Sometimes it is difficult to know what to say when you come into contact with someone who has recently dealt with a tragedy or personal difficulty. Everyone deals with these situations differently, and offering condolences can, to one person, seem trite and contrived, while another person will be bitterly offended if you don't react as though you knew the lost loved one as dearly as you know a sibling. It can be especially difficult to contextualize these situations when they occur to people you do not know.
Alison Landsberg wrote an extremely stimulating article titled 'Memory, Empathy and the Politics of Identification' which deals with notions of confronting tragedy in the lives of others and especially with regards to tragedy in film. She discusses Roman Polanski's Holocaust drama The Pianist to illustrate her points that sympathy and empathy are a far cry from one another, and that merely being able to relate to an individual's plight emotionally is not enough to enable a person to contextualize the event in a historical context that can be intellectually examined and learned from.
This is a subject I am extremely passionate about, having written my own article regarding the use of imagery of children in Holocaust discourse to stimulate emotion without engaging intellect. In my article I argue that many individual authors and even some museums use the imagery of childhood innocence (a very recent social invention, but don't even get me started on that) to provoke an emotional connection which leads to the lack of intellectual engagement with historical material and devalues the experiences of individuals living through the Holocaust. I only wish I had known about Landsberg's amazing article before writing my own paper, and I now feel that I definitely need to incorporate some of her brilliant enlightening points as support for my own thesis.
Landsberg comments on the notion that film and other visual media facilitate the creation of 'prosthetic memories' during the formation of which people 'suture' themselves to historical narratives. She writes, 'The person does not simply learn about the past intellectually, but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live in the traditional sense.'
She draws attention to the differences between sympathy and empathy as such: 'Empathy, unlike sympathy, requires mental, cognitive activity. It entails an intellectual engagement with the plight of the other . . . . Contemplation and distance, two elements central to empathy, are not present in sympathy.' While sympathy assumes similarity and shared feelings among the subject and the viewer, empathy places emphasis on difference and forces the viewer to examine the experience of the other as entirely separate from his or her own experiences.
In relation to the protagonist of The Pianist Landsberg writes, 'His progressive dehumanization makes [identification] difficult to sustain and ultimately requires us to develop a more intellectual engagement with him and with the circumstances of his existence.' The ability of Polanski to utilize this technique demonstrates his immense skill as a filmmaker and his integrity as a man who refuses to trivialize the experience of individuals who lived through the Holocaust. (This certainly has something to do with the fact that as a young child Polanski lived in the Krakow ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland and survived the Holocaust by hiding with Catholic families. His father survived Mauthausen Concentration Camp, but his mother was killed in Auschwitz.) Unlike many films which frame WWII and Holocaust narratives as Americanized hero stories, Polanski takes a different route by focussing on the dehumanizing and solitude undergone by most Jews who survived.
While reading this article, I felt an intense intrigue which I haven't felt while reading an academic article since before Christmas when I was reading a brilliant book about Alfred Hitchcock's aesthetics and the visual representation of his politics by Allan Richard called Hitchcock's Romantic Irony (my boyfriend can attest to how gleeful I was when reading this work, as he was repeatedly interrupted in his own reading by my constantly chirping, 'Oh my god, listen to this! This book is awesome!'), and I strongly urge everyone to get their hands on a copy of this article if you have even the remotist interest in film theory or the Holocaust. It is a very important and extremely relevant piece of writing regarding critical audience engagement with global entertainment media, and I can't stress enough how well Landsberg articulates points I have attempted to put forward in the past.
Landsberg writes, 'There is a layer of mediation between viewers and narrative . . . . We as viewers must make the intellectual bridge.' I promise that analysing a film's political and social messages will not make watching movies less enjoyable. It will merely make you a more informed citizen and, most likely, a better person. What's holding you back?
Alison Landsberg's article was published in International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society in June 2009 (edition 22.2). Go find a copy!
