an infamous scene from his monumental Shoah (1985), filmmaker Claude Lanzmann interviews Abraham Bamba, a Holocaust survivor and barber, who had been forced to cut the hair of incoming prisoners in Treblinka. Overcome by traumatic memories, Bamba only recounts his experiences in the concentration camp at Lanzmann’s relentless and persistent questioning. Throughout the interview, the camera lingers on Bamba, filming him in his barber shop as he gives one of his customers a haircut. As is known now, the setting of the interview was highly staged. Bamba actually no longer worked as a barber at the time of filming, Lanzmann had rented another barber’s studio in Tel Aviv for the purposes of the shooting, and, at closer observation, one can note that Bamba mostly cuts air, not his customer’s hair. Famous for rejecting the use of archival/historical footage, Lanzmann drew on such tactics of performance, staging, and forceful questioning, in an attempt to recreate and simulate “authentically” rather than replay personal and collective trauma “historically.” Beginning with this scene, my videographic presentation explores the ethics of documentary questioning: first, in documentary films like Shoah, which refuse archival reappropriation; second, in documentary films that build on archival footage; and third, in video essays such as my own. Which question do videographic scholars ask of and with historical footage? Which ethical implications do they assume, evoke, and pose? By asking and exploring these questions, I aim to suggest a working understanding and definition of a new “videographic memory studies.”
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