It is not merely a story or narrative being recorded in cinematographic and video testimony, but the literal making of it: the painful and deliberate choice of words, selection of details and memories, the effect of these details on the speaker, and then the effect of these details on the narrative itself. We watch as experiences enter speech: that point at which memory is transformed into language, often for the first time. (1988, 161)
For both Young and Hartman, the real testimony happens somewhere beyond the oral narrative. According to Young,
FIGURE 4.2 A still from the video testimony of Ulrike Poppe from 2010 in the Haus der Geschichte, Bonn.
© Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
In the testimonial image, we also perceive traces of a story the survivor is not telling; these traces are in his eyes, his movements, his expressions – all of which become part of the overall text of video testimony, suggesting much more than we are hearing or seeing. (1988, 162)
For Hartman, “the embodiment of the survivor, their gestures and bearing is part of the testimony” (1996, 144). Those extra-verbal expressions of testimony tend in fact to appear as more “real,” more “authentic,” than the oral narrative. Young (1988) acknowledges that the medium of video has an ordering effect on the testimony and that camera position and lighting have an impact on the representation of the object on film. He fails, however, to acknowledge the full impact of the aesthetics of video testimonies on both the representation of the witnesses to history’s individual memory and the viewers’ reception thereof.
Video testimonies have been dubbed rather derogatively as “talking heads”: the camera focus is generally on the face of the witnesses to history or their upper body. Occasionally the hands are also shown. In this way, the emphasis is placed on those parts of the body that are generally considered to represent the extra-verbal expressions of individual memory particularly well. The choice of background and lighting techniques further highlight those expressions. Early video testimonies were generally recorded in a private environment, often in the witnesses’ living room and sometimes at the location of the event that the witness testifies to. The camera angle and lightening were often rather arbitrary. Lately, however, an aesthetics that was developed for TV documentaries (see Bösch 2008; Keilbach 2008) has been adopted for most video testimonies, in particular those shown in museums. The witness’s face is illuminated in such a way that all of the emotional expressions are highlighted and a monochromatic, mostly black or gray, background is chosen (see Figure 4.2). Diana Gring and Karin Theilen, who carried out the video testimony project for the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, explain that the neutral background
is on the one hand beneficial for the editing process; on the other hand, the picture focuses in this way on the witness to history. Recipients can concentrate on the face, the facial expressions and the gestures of the interviewees; this allowed us to mimic a dialogic structure, a “virtual encounter.” (2007, 122)
Through the camera focus, the lighting, and the choice of background, a dialogue between the witnesses to history and the viewers is therefore mimicked.
The prerequisite for the construction of such a dialogue is that the interview process that is the origin of the video testimony has to be masked. The interviewer is generally left out of the camera frame. In the extracts that are shown in museums, his or her voice is only rarely heard. While, in normal TV interviews, the interviewee is generally looking at the interviewer, in video testimonies, especially in those shown in museums, the witnesses to history are often asked to look directly into the camera. In this way, the viewer will look the witness directly in the eye when watching the video. The producers of the video testimonies for the interviews in the Imperial War Museum observed that asking the witnesses to history to look into the camera instead of at the interviewer was one of the most difficult things about the interviews.4 In the Museo Diffuso, a small World War II museum in Turin which has based its exhibition almost exclusively on video testimonies, the sound of the video testimonies, which is transmitted over headphones, works only if visitors stand in front of the video testimonies and look straight at them.
The aesthetics of video testimonies thus construct a representation of individual memory that is supposed to bring viewers particularly close to the individual memory of the witness to history while at the same time engaging them in a virtual conversation. This effect is arrived at by decontextualizing the witnesses to history from the sociocultural context in which they live and their testimony from the situation that brought it about – the narrative interview. This decontextualization in turn allows the musealization of video testimonies and their use as carriers of cultural memory. Like an object when it enters a collection, the memory of witnesses to history is taken out of its original context. Their testimony, a supposed representation of individual memory, is presented as existing outside time and space. The collection of video testimonies also means turning them into storage memory; it is the attempt to turn communicative memory into cultural memory. This, in turn, means detaching the testimonies from the witnesses to the history that uttered them. Neither the interviewers nor the witnesses can fully control how future viewers will receive their testimonies and for what purposes they will be used. Recoded testimonies allow viewers to flick through them, skip parts, and fast-forward. They also allow curators to choose the most appropriate video testimonies for the exhibitions.
Exhibiting video testimonies
Only very few video testimonies from the entire collections enter museums’ exhibition halls – and only short clips of those video testimonies. Museum visitors’ attention span is short. Multiple objects, texts, and other information sources demand their attention. The video testimonies for museums are, therefore, generally cut to a length of a few minutes or even seconds. Out of the whole collection, the most interesting stories and the best storytellers tend to be chosen. Occasionally, in museums where the video testimonies are produced directly for the exhibitions, interviewers even try to extract the most “exhibitable” stories from the witnesses to history during the interview process itself (De Jong 2011b, 259; 2012, 302–303). In museums, visitors are presented with the highlights, with the most eloquent witnesses to history and with the most interesting or affective stories.
This process of selection is not different from the process of selection of other museum objects. In the case of video testimonies, however, it does raise urgent ethical questions. Is it permissible only to use extracts from entire testimonies and only to present to the visitors some of the witnesses to history? Exhibiting video testimonies always means making a compromise between the needs of the visitors and the video testimonies as ethically fragile sources. Curators are aware of this dilemma. Thus, Suzanne Bardgett of the Imperial War Museum observes that, “to our intense relief, the survivors liked the way their testimonies had been used and understood the reasons for their ‘fragmentation’” (Bardgett, n.d.). Exactly because of these ethical questions, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin decided against using video testimonies in its exhibition. Instead, visitors are given the opportunity to watch entire video testimonies from the collection of the Fortunoff Institute in a separate room (Baranowski 2009).
If they are exhibited, video testimonies occupy a rather peculiar position among the things shown in an exhibition. For museum exhibitions, Roger Fayet proposes a distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary museum objects (2007, 24). Primary museum objects are the things and artworks that are exhibited. Secondary museum objects are the “models, replicas, reconstructions or visual representations as well as textual information” (Fayet 2007, 26) that are used to explain to the visitors how they should read the primary museum objects and what they are supposed to represent. Tertiary museum objects are objects that are in the museum, that do not directly have relevance for the exhibition, but that nevertheless influence the way in which the exhibition is received by the visitors – such as CCTV cameras, signs for emergency exits, or fire extinguishers. Video testimonies are generally used as a combination