Photographic Passages to the Past in Eastern European Non-Fiction Films

Abstract

There is a tendency in recent nonfiction film to recontextualise archival photographs in creative ways. In films like Felvidék. Caught In-Between (Vladislava Plančíková, 2014) photographs are part of a collage work, while films like Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011) use photographs in animated environments. At the other extreme is Radu Jude's Dead Nation (2017) presenting a series of photographs as a film that paradoxically demonstrates the lack of images of the Romanian Holocaust. These films open up new possibilities for the medium of photography, redefining through cinema the complex relationship between photography/the indexical trace and history. This chapter builds upon the phenomenological approach to images by George Didi-Hubermann and László Tarnay in order to discuss intermedial relations of nonfiction films and to present what the photographic image means in the post-media age documentary.