I think the film "Shoah" constitutes a pretty eloquent argument against
ever using footage of concentration camps and corpses, or so I try to
argue at http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Lanzmann.html By constructing a
nine and a half hour documentary about something that's never shown,
Lanazmann represents the true meaning of the Shoah not as bodies (which
really don't have much to do with the living people that once inhabited
them) but as an absence. It seems to me an almost immutable principle of
cinema that the viewer tends to identify, in a positive sense, with the
things seen -- rooting for the bad guy being the common phenomenon. So
while Resnais's corpse footage certainly causes revulsion at the
inhumanity of it all, at the same time the viewer of corpses is put in
the position of the Nazi murderers who created them, and who are their
only true owners. The film was certainly appropriate for a time when
people wanted to forget all this, and his montage serves as an intrusive
reminder, but the power of intrusive Shoah footage is I think more
profoundly evoked in the great Nuremberg movie-watching scene in
Fuller's "Verboten," in the cutting between the images and the boy's
face which represents as only Fuller can a clash of conscoiusnessess,
the way violence represents an impingement on identity.

- Fred