The Audiovisual Unconscious: Media and Trauma in the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

The Audiovisual Unconscious: Media and Trauma in the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

Collective memory

Video testimonies of Holocaust survivor stories are, in themselves, an archival medium. The conventions of shooting and distributing video convey an immediacy and an absence of cinematic artifice that reveal rather than obscure the unconscious and unintended effects. Like the archive, the video testimony gathers and presents the “noise” as well as the subject matter of its content. Details from gestures, eyes, expression, etc. are recorded and these visual registers of the psyche amplify the sound recording of the video. Pinchevski posits that the video testimony extends the voice and narrative of the testimony, providing viewers a greater sense of the survivor’s experience—one that may be inexpressible in mere written form or may belie the narration. Citing the investigative work of psychoanalysts and scholars of the Holocaust, Pinchevski believes both the archive and video are mediums of transmission providing society deep memory; that is, memories which cannot be immediately recalled without some type of mediation. Although it is arguable that either the archive and documentary video is more authentic than film or text, they each record the event as it occurred in real time and thereby enable the user/viewer to become witnesses to the historic event. More than words or symbols, the video archive, like the video testimony, disseminates and transmits the inexpressible.

Pinchevski, Amit

Critical Inquiry

2012

Polk, Victoria

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

Journal Article

Pinchevski, Amit. "The Audiovisual Unconscious: Media and Trauma in the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies." Critical Inquiry 39, no. 1 (Autumn 2012): 142-166. MLA International Bibliography, EBSCOhost (accessed April 20, 2013).