I have not seen the new film 'Son of Saul', by first time Hungarian director Lazlo Nemes, but presently it is much discussed in the media, particularly since it won the 2016 Oscar for 'Best Foreign Language Film'. As a film it naturally brings to mind the sharp crticism made by the German philospher Adorno after WW2 -
'There can be no poetry after Auschwitz'.
But of course there was poetry after Auschwitz, and memoirs by many who suffered but survived the many death camps, until such books became a genre of book in their own right. My favourite of this type of book is one of the early and outstanding examples, Primo Levi's 'If this is a man'/'The Truce', which-trust me in this-is the best antidote to the false positive feelings and power of commerce that surround the season of Christmas that you will ever find.
But the full quote by Adorno should be quoted about the difficulties around any expression of art
that pertains to life, particularly film, which includes the portraying of profound suffering.....
'Perennial suffering
has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence
it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer
write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question
whether after Auschwitz you can go on living- -especially whether one who
escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go
on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle
of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no
Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of
atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer
living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole
existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a
man killed twenty years earlier.
with thanks to here.
No comments:
Post a Comment