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.

Representing the Holocaust raises fundamental questions regarding the almost impossible task of reproducing a specific ‘reality’ on-screen. Animation provides an environment that is both realistic and metaphoric and thus it enables the viewer to imagine the claustrophobic reality of life in the Warsaw Ghetto and access an emotional truth.

The literal and/or figurative violation of the human eye has been a striking figure of cinema since its inception, reflecting back on the act of spectatorship itself. Here, an uncanny confrontation between our role as spectators and how we ‘see’ history takes place directly through the eyes of a child.

Holocaust films share common tropes. A number of Holocaust films feature children – utilized for any number of narrative purposes. A fair number of Holocaust films also include birds, usually to visualize a character’s longing. Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto uses these common tropes, but breaks the mold.

This article argues that animated film is a legitimate artistic vehicle to represent and memorialize the Holocaust, and that the use of animation heightens the impact of and emotional response to the events portrayed in Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto will be considered here in the light of two radically different views of the relationship between art and the Holocaust – one proposed by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the other by the film-maker Alain Resnais.