This paper will explore convergences between memory studies, the posthumanities, and film studies in the context of films that reference Polish Catholic violence towards Jewish people in provincial spaces, which I refer to as an 'aftermath cinema'. Within a number of scholarly fields, there have recently been a series of reframings of sites of Holocaust death. Post-millennial histories of Polish rural violence, which emerged after Jan T. Gross's study of the murders of Jewish citizens in Jedwabne in 1941, have shifted attention towards provincial spaces, inspiring new posthuman and ecological approaches to sites of suffering. I will consider the writing of two scholars working in this area, Roma Sendyka and Ewa Domańska. Sendyka has used the term 'non-sites of memory' in reference to spaced where (primarily Jewish) victims of Polish violence lie buried, and which are not marked by traditional commemorative signs. These spaces often cannot be situated comfortably within local memory, as they signal the complicity of communities in murder, silencing, or the failure to properly bury victims. Domańska's scholarship has drawn attention to how decomposing bodies in these locations have physically transformed them: the chemical composition of soil changes with the presence of human remains, affecting the vegetation, and marking the spaces as sites of burial.
My particular interest in this paper is to consider how such sites are framed in a number of recent Polish fiction films concerned with Polish Catholic violence against Jewish Poles during the Holocaust. I argue that the decomposed human remains of Jewish victims of violence, buried unceremoniously in non-sites of memory, affect not only the ecosystem in which they lie, but also the aesthetic composition of the fiction-film frame. As Polish cinema attempts to grapple with the difficult legacy of murder, looting and desecration, non-sites of memory are frequently the stage on which processes of exhumation (of material human remains, and of confessions and memories) are carried out. I trace this process across two films that enact archaeological extractions: Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012) and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013), as well as a third, It Looks Pretty From A Distance (Sasnal and Sasnal, 2011), that depicts rural space in general as a waste-heap of broken objects and people from which neither remains nor memory can be properly exhumed.
Selected Bibliography
Domańska, Ewa. 2019. The environmental history of mass graves. Journal of Genocide Research. July 19. https://doi.10.1080/14623528.2019.1657306.
Gross, Jan T. 2003. Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941. London: Arrow Books.
Pasikowski, Władysław. 2012. Pokłosie/Aftermath. Poland/Russia/Netherlands.
Pawlikowski, Paweł. 2013. Ida. Poland/Denmark/France/UK.
Sasnal, Wilhelm, and Anka Sasnal. 2011. Z Daleka Widok Jest Piękny/It Looks Pretty From A Distance. Poland.
Sendyka, Roma. 2013. Pryzma – zrozumieć nie-miejsce pamięci (non-lieu de mémoire). Teksty Drugie 1, 2: 323-344.
