Short Film Studies - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2014

Using choreography as a conceptual framework involving movement vocabulary and syntax and examining the spatial relationships between bodies, this analysis focuses on the ways in which the movements of the animated characters in this film effectively evoke a sense of dread and confinement.

Body Memory confronts the viewer with a tale of deported people’s experience of hopelessness and terror. In this article, I engage with the film and analyse elements of its concrete cinematic practice, in order to investigate how it achieves symbolic significance and universality.

This article begins with a phenomenological description of the perception of the soundtrack in Body Memory: what is heard and what do the sounds express. Inspired by cognitive semantics, it then continues to present this perception as linked to the listener’s body memory.

This analysis of Body Memory will discuss the significance of the railway track. I argue that, just as Pikkov’s string figures embody memory, so his train lines function as cinematic lieux de mémoire, evoking at once the technological hopes of modernity and their part in humanity’s destruction.

Body Memory treats collective memories of World War II and the Soviet occupation of Estonia. The article argues that the film’s attempt to negotiate national and international perspectives on this issue echoes the difficulties of integrating Eastern European historical experiences in a contemporary European memory culture dominated by Holocaust studies.

This article explores the depiction of memory, death, trauma and bodies in order to argue that the physical and historical limits are erased. Memory and trauma are imprinted in the physical body but they transgress the normal limitations, death included, as we witness the return of the animated/living dead.

The primary source of terror in Body Memory emerges from the lack of materiality underneath the unravelling body. Using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the ‘body-without-organs’ this article discusses the biopolitical implications of representing the body as an assemblage of string.

In feature-length Holocaust cinema, viewers witness two hours of harrowing events, before being pacified with an ending providing some comfort and relief; often undermining what has gone before. However, in short-film Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto, this structure is reversed, fitting perfectly with the medium to provide a stronger, lasting impact.

This article explores the generic hybridity of Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto, as it unites aesthetic and historical elements. The film is an example of what Claude Lanzmann calls ‘a fiction of the real’, in which the elements of aesthetic and documentary are differently aligned from those in Shoah (1985).

Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto uses non-human figures and a non-realist aesthetic to engage us in an affective, embodied experience. Our momentarily tragic encounter with history is shaped by difference and otherness and thus we sense our distance from the past while glancing at a history we cannot grasp.