Читать книгу Museum Media - Группа авторов - Страница 58

As the examples of the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation show, video testimonies were collected long before they were used as exhibition items. Video testimonies from those collections are now also shown in museums and exhibitions. Clips from the video testimonies of the Shoah Foundation are part of the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, for example. As well as drawing on already existing collections, many museums started to collect video testimonies before they decided to present them in their exhibitions. In the Neuengamme Memorial the first major interview project was carried out in the early 1990s. First, audio technology was used, but video recordings soon replaced it. Both have been included in the new permanent exhibition which opened its doors in 2005. In the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, where the first oral history interviews were carried out in the early 1990s as well, a large-scale video interview project was initiated in 1999. When the memorial decided to design a new permanent exhibition (which opened in 2007) the video testimonies were included in the plans for the new exhibition. Yad Vashem has carried out interviews since its beginnings in 1953. Today around 60 percent of the collected ten thousand testimonies are in video format.² Some clips from those video testimonies have entered the permanent exhibition which was inaugurated in 2005.

Video testimonies were, and are, collected to bridge collection gaps, to complement other sources with the voices and faces of the witnesses to history and for research purposes. In the case of video survivor testimonies, for example, the director of the Neuengamme Memorial, Detelf Garbe, observes that information on “the prisoner’s multi-layered ‘everyday life,’ the inner structures of the camp society, the conditions for survival and the perspectives of the different prisoner groups” could be extracted only from the memory of the survivors (1994, 35).³ With the advent of oral history and social history in the 1980s, such questions gained more and more research interest. Especially in the case of video testimonies from Holocaust survivors, collections were also motivated by a desire to give a voice back to the victims and by a sense of duty to preserve their testimonies for future audiences (De Jong 2011b, 248; 2012, 298). At least since the broadcast of Marvin J. Chomsky’s mini-series Holocaust in 1979, there has been a demand that the victims themselves be heard. Their voices and faces should be contrasted to the fictionalized representations of the Holocaust – but also to the archival pictures showing starved prisoners and heaps of corpses (see Young 1988, 163; Hartman 1996, 143).

Collecting can be considered the first step of the musealization of an object. Being collected, an object is taken out of its original context to enter the realm of signification. In the words of the Polish historian Krzysztof Pomian (1990), the object becomes a “semiophore”; its primary function becomes a semiotic one. The collected object represents an event, a time period, a style school, a person, and so on. What sounds fairly straightforward in the case of objects and artworks – a Greek vase comes to represent Greek antiquity, a painting by Umberto Boccioni represents Futurism, and so on – raises some ethical questions in the case of video testimonies. Video testimonies are representations of remembering individuals. Collecting video testimonies means – as macabre as this might sound – storing for the future aging bodies and voices that will inevitably die. Especially in the case of the Holocaust and World War II, where we are facing the disappearance of the last witnesses to history, video testimony appears as a medium that allows us to save communicative memory for future generations. As I will show in what follows, in video testimonies a conversation between a future audience and the witnesses to history is therefore staged. The methodologies that are used for the production of this medium, in turn, are supposed to show a pristine representation of the individual memory of the witness to history.