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Article

French

ID: <

10.4000/elh.603

>

·

DOI: <

10.4000/elh.603

>

Where these data come from
The impossible word of the end of the fiction and the witness statement

Abstract

This article follows the making of the ending of La Petite Prairie aux bouleaux [The Small Birch Meadow] (2003), the first film directed by Marceline Loridan-Ivens on her own, at the age of seventy-five. This work of auto-fiction shows the problematic relationship between a survivor of Birkenau and the remains of the camp that she finds, but as an old woman and merely a visitor. At times, past and present connect. At times, they do not. This largely depends, partly on the dangerousness for the psyche of the event targeted, and partly on the exact area of the site being covered. It is a question, here, of the effects produced by the translation delivered, in extremis, of ‘Birkenau’, from the German to the French, by way of the words of the ending. It is a translation which, in transmitting knowledge, allows one to open a work which is ending, and to bring into motion a witness who is on the verge of falling silent. The imagination of the filmmaker –and the materiality of the film– takes over from the history of a place which was a centre of death, which will no longer be able to be written via the mouths of the survivors, and writes it via her own mouth as an historical witness.

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