Abstract
I coined the term “palimpsest” in my book Les Écrans de l’ombre on cinematic uses of the Resistance. In order to grasp the issues that have crystallized around representations of the past, I believed it was necessary to go back to the creative process, enter the “black box” of the “film under construction,” and unearth its layers of writing.1 This first task was centered on several predefined phases of the genesis of films such as the commission, funding, and screenplay writing. I elaborated this method more systematically in 2007 in a book about Night and Fog that examines all the mysteries surrounding its production from the perspective of micro-history.2 Tracking each stage of the production of Alain Resnais’s film raised unprecedented questions and problems: which method and sources should be used to track the history of filming, identify the challenges surrounding the iconographic research, gather the crew’s opinions of the images of the camps, study the multiple references of the musical score, and enter the film editing room? These problems had to be solved with time. As well as the archives I was used to analyzing—contracts, budgets, various stages of screenplay development, correspondence—I also had to analyze new and sometimes tenuous traces: bills, orders for equipment, script supervisors’ notes, film laboratory worksheets, unused rushes from the various changes made to the short film, and production stills. Just as Walter Benjamin praised Siegfried Kracauer as a “ragpicker,” I used my stick to pick up tattered papers and film fragments that I put in my cart along the way.3
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Notes
For the “black box” method borrowed from Bruno Latour and the concept of a “palimpsest film” (“film palimpseste”), see S. Lindeperg, Les Écrans de l’ombre. La Seconde Guerre dans le cinéma français (1944–1969) (“Shadows on the Screen: The Second World War in French Cinema”) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1997).
Sylvie Lindeperg, Nuit et Brouillard. Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007).
Walter Benjamin, “Un marginal sort de l’ombre. À propos des Employés de S. Kracauer,” in Œuvre II, trans. Maurice de Gandillac, Rainer Rochlitz, and Pierre Rusch (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 188.
Pierre Nora, ed., about Tablets of Stone in “Entre Mémoire et Histoire,” in Les Lieux de mémoire. I. La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), XL.
Olga Wormser and Henri Michel (texts chosen and presented by), Tragédie de la Déportation. 1940–1945. Témoignages de survivants des camps de concentration allemands (“Testimonies of Survivors of German Concentration Camps”) (Paris: Hachette, 1954).
Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
Albrecht Dümling, “Musikalischer Kontrapunkt zur filmischen Darstellung des Schreckens. Hanns Eislers Musik zu ‘Nuit et Brouillard ’ von Alain Resnais,” in Kunst und Literatur nach Auschwitz, ed. Manuel Köppen (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1993), 113–123.
Michael Schneider, Den Kopf verkehrt aufgesetzt oder die melancholische Linke (Darmstadt, Germany: Luchterhand, 1981).
For the international distribution of Nuit et Brouillard, see also Ewout van der Knaap, ed., Uncovering the Holocaust. The International Reception of Night and Fog (London: Wallflower Press, 2006). For the analysis of the German translations: Jörg Frieß, “Das Blut ist geronnen. Die Münder sind verstummt? Die zwei deutschen Synchronfassungen von Nuit et Brouillard,” Filmblatt 10, 28 (fall 2005): 40–57.
For the filming of the trial, see Sylvie Lindeperg and Annette Wieviorka, “The Two Scenes of the Eichmann Trial,” Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, no. 6 (November–December 2008): 1249–1274;
Sylvie Lindeperg and Annette Wieviorka, Univers concentrationnaire et génocide. Voir, savoir, comprendre (Paris: Fayard/Mille et Une nuits, 2008).
Ruth Klüger, Weiter Leben (Göttingen Wallstein Verlag, 1992).
Walter Benjamin, Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 463.
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© 2013 Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
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Lindeperg, S. (2013). Film Production as a Palimpsest. In: Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (eds) Behind the Screen. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_6
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