History and Memory

European cinematograph - European history: who owns it, and who owns the rights to its representation? This question has been posed several times in recent years, not least thanks to Steven Spielberg's SCHINDLER'SLIST and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, but it has been in the air from the time that Bob Fosse's CABARET and even Robert Wise's THE SOUND OF MUSIC. A whole generation of European directors in the 1970s and 1980s rose to the challenge to re-conquer lost territory: Visconti (THE DAMNED), Bertolucci (NOVECENTO), Bergman (THE SERPENT'S EGG), Syberberg (OUR HITLER), Fassbinder (THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN, LILI MARLEEN), and Reitz (HEIMAT) to mention just a few. The British cinematograph produced its heritage movies, adaptions of Jane Austen to E.M. Foster, Shakespeare to Henry James. And after a brief spell revisiting the Resistance (Louis Malle's LACOMBE LUCIEN, AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS, Joseph Losey's M. KLEIN), so did the French: works of Marcel Pagnol, Emile Zola, Edmond Rostand are back on the big screen.

In SCHINDLER'S LIST, Spielberg has told the story of the Holocaust as a double salvation story: as a Moses out of Egypt story, and as a story of the elect. He has (and this Claude Lanzman recognized quite rightly) "appropriated" the absolute negation of life implied MARLEEN by Auschwitz, by answering it with a kind of Darwinian biologism (how many physical individuals the Schindler Jews have produced as descendants). Spielberg's movie, in this respect, is conceived (or can be perceived) as a kind of wager - a triumph of nature over un-culture/ barbarity, and a triumph of synecdoche over literalism ("whoever saves one life, saves the world"). Both, of course, are problematic triumphs, but they cannot be blamed on or credited to a single director or a single movie. Nor even can the problem be reduced to the battle Hollywood vs. Europe. The wager is in some fundamental sense inherent in the cinematograph as a historical and cultural phenomenon. For was this not once the promise of cinematograph: the rescue and redemption of reality? If we are now accusing Spielberg of arrogance and hubris, because he thinks his cinematograph can "rescue" history, are we not cutting the ground from underneath the entire debate about the redemptive function of cinematograph? Or is what is so objectionable for Europeans about Hollywood the fact that now it is rescuing even that which was never real and never history?

The European cinematograph has always fought its case on the basis of greater realism, it has been committed to a version of both totality and reflection, even where this reality was that of inner feelings, of the mind. Against this we cannot simply contrast a notion of fantasy, of dream worlds and DreamWorks, whether we see the latter as providing harmless or pernicious entertainment. Rather, we have to accept that the cinematograph commonly stands also for powers that compete with reality, that are "invading" or "immersing" reality, and even - as we saw -"colonizing" reality. This fear finds one of its most typical manifestation in the complaint that Hollywood has "taken away our history," and that the cinematograph is continually eating up history, swallowing the past, only to spit it out again as nostalgic-narcissistic fiction!