The Strange Twentieth-Century Family Album.

Abstract

Starting with the story of the Auschwitz Album (a photographic report recorded in the spring of 1944 on the ramp in Birkenau), this article examines the modes of the album's   reinterpretation in three works of cinema and television. By contrast, Alain Jaubert's film Auschwitz, the Album, the Memory (1984), relies on an articulation between archive and testimony to reflect on what lies outside the frame of the photographs, to explore their signs and margins. Harun Farocki, in Bilder der Welt uns Inschrift des Krieges (1988), places the Auschwitz photographs at the heart of a reflection on the journey of the visible and the instability of meaning, applied to the image according to the horizons of expectations and the contexts of the reading. Both of these works are compared with the BBC television series Auschwitz, the Nazis and the Final Solution (2005), which mixes reconstructed scenes and virtual images, testimonies and archival documents (including negatives from the album ), put to the service of a new economy of the visible.