Archive Fever

By far, my favorite exhibit in NYC was to the International Center of Photography to see Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. This show was recommended to Varinthorn by Julio Morales during his visit to Portland. I'm paraphrasing, but Julio suggested to V that in his opinion, Okwui Enwezor, the curator of this show, is the best curator in the world right now. I don't know if I know enough to say that he is or isn't, but this show was awesome!

One of my favorite pieces in this show was The Specialist: Adolf Eichmann. I found the following description of this film on the International Historic Films website:
On May 11, 1960, Adolph Eichmann, a chief of SS transportation, was captured by the Israeli secret service in Argentina. One year later he was put on trial in Jerusalem and tried for crimes against humanity. Chronicled on international television and on the front page of every newspaper, this was the first opportunity for worldwide focus on the Nazi attempt to exterminate European Jewry. Since that trial, the idea of a separate, describable set of events, now called the Holocaust, became part of human consciousness. American documentarian Leo Hurwitz compiled over 500 hours of footage, which Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman then edited down to its eloquent essentials. The Specialist refrains for the most part from showing atrocity footage. The impact of Eichmann's evil is established clearly and horrifyingly by watching the 55-year-old bureaucrat squirm and twitch, smirking and half smiling at much of the evidence presented against him and by watching the faces of the witnesses talking just sixteen years after the events as they reveal their unimaginable ordeals.

Ever since visiting Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar in 2004, I have been profoundly stirred by the idea that the German people were able to allow the Nazis to run concentration camps. It seems so strange that average middle class people in the cities were unaware of what was going on, and that there was an entire bureaucratic structure in place for making this happen. In addition to visiting the concentration camp, we also toured the Weimar city archives, and were given information about contextualizing Germany's relationship to history, which is so profoundly different from the way that I have experienced history before. I guess what struck me most was that the German people can't romanticize this history, and also can't erase it. And so they are in a position to tell a story that needs to be told, but can't have a happy ending. Buildings are moved 12" to the side of their foundation to indicate that they were once dismantled, shipped to Moscow, and returned to the same spot for historical preservation. Other buildings are raised only to have their foundations filled with the rubble of the building that existed there previously. History becomes something less of a grand statement or bronze statue and more of a subtle gesture towards remembering.

Thus, one of the most fascinating parts of this film for me was the dialogue where an interregator asked Eichmann to explain the details of his working process down to the number of files he kept and how those files were used. Basically, Eichman kept 3 files that he used to decide whether or not to send Jewish people to concentration camps. One file was for situations where a precedent already existed, one file was for situations where there was no precedent, and the middle file was for situations where he wasn't sure whether a precedent applied. The interrogator was trying to get Eichman to explain what he did with the middle file. How much of a say did he have in the decision making, and did he ever make proposals? If he made a proposal, the implication was that he was guilty.

I was struck by how bureaucratic this situation was. I was thinking about my job, and my files, and how surreal it would be to have to talk about the decisions I make based on my organizational structures. I was thinking about how the seemingly mundane aspects of the office world can become incriminating. And I know that this sort of a half-baked rant, but I was thinking about how hard it is to draw the line sometimes between being held responsible for killing people indirectly vs. being the person wtih the gun.