Holocaust One of the Benefits

Holocaust

One of the benefits of using media alternative to pure scholastic inquiry is that facts can only say so much. For example, cartoons allow for depictions of talking animals that can do and say things that live actors never could -- whether it's the Coyote surviving a bomb he set for the Road Runner or Jerry outsmarting Tom again and again. When it comes to representing poignant pieces of history, though, the artist has a clear responsibility to render the story in ways that are politically meaningful and accurate from a subjective, experiential standpoint. There is still an obligation on the part of the artist to capture the historical essence of events like the Holocaust, which is why Art Spiegelman's Maus remains a powerful addition to any library of research on the Holocaust. Memoirs, after all, provide some of the richest primary source material for historians. This is also why Yael Hersonski's Film Unfinished retains credibility in spite of it being a mash-up of documentary material. Works of art and literature add an impressionistic credence to the actual events and real felt trauma of the victims of the Holocaust.

When readers encounter memoirs and survivor accounts like Ruth Kluger's Still Alive or Anne Frank's diary or Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, a relationship develops between storyteller and reader. It is not so much that storytellers are won't to exaggerate, but that storytellers are conveying their impressions of events. Even media that might seem reliable such as photography or film do not capture reality in their entirety. Selective attention on the part of filmmakers, or inaccurate attention on the part of propaganda filmmakers are some examples of the way "reliable" or "factual' forms of media cannot be trusted. Storytelling remains one of the best, most reliable sources of information about human suffering and trauma. When suffering and trauma are depicted in decidedly non-documentary ways like Spiegelman achieves with Maus, true art is created -- the fusion between the real and the imaginary. Maus is remarkable in that the graphic novel manages to capture the trauma in ways that are equally, if not more, captivating than Schindler's List.

Therefore, framing the Holocaust "outside of the purview of traditional academic scholarship" is a fruitful and honest endeavor. The media does impact the message, which is why a graphic novel like Maus will reach a different readership than a memoir like Still Alive. Moreover, the media is the message. Graphic novels enable the visual depiction of events in color palettes that may not exist in the "real" world, and with non-human forms that do not speak but which symbolize human beings instead. The finished package becomes a fusion that speaks to human beings in an organic way, as the brain does not work in completely linear and logical ways. If it did, then we would be living on Vulcan and not on Earth.

A direct comparison of a mis-en-scene from Maus and from Film Unfinished can illustrate the necessary confluence of documentary evidence and human impressionism. For one, the cover art used for each of these media formats is remarkably -- and perhaps not coincidentally -- similar. Spiegelman's graphic novel cover depicts a large white circle front and center. On this white circle is a Nazi swastika with a cat face at its center. The title "Maus" is written in a bloody red font, and below the white circle are characters -- perhaps Vladek and Anja. The cover art on Film Unfinished also has a circle -- a wheel occupying the background. This wheel is not white, but it is a film reel to represent the Nazi propaganda film in question. Just as the white circle on the cover of Maus sports a Nazi swastika, so to does the film reel. Below the film reel are crowds of people.

Both Maus and Film Unfinished use frame narratives to anchor present and past, and to impart the sense that there is an objective documentarian who is offering the reader (or viewer) tidbits of historical information and artifacts. For example, the opening scenes of both Maus and Film Unfinished involve the media itself -- film in the case of Film Unfinished and drawing in the case of Maus. Both Maus and Film Unfinished also use several crowd scenes that can be directly compared for their structure, content, and meaning. The crowd scenes are intense for many reasons. For one, the crowd scenes demonstrate the extent of anti-Semitism and the way it had seeped into the European consciousness. This is especially true in the scene about 40 seconds into Film Unfinished, depicting the city. Second, the crowds scenes depict the nameless faces of Holocaust victims, which ironically become humanized through interviews in the case of Film Unifinished and through memorials to actual people like Art Spiegelman's parents in Maus.