Ithaca College

Visiting Assistant Professor in Screen Studies, Rachel Schaff, presented her paper, "Lest We Forget (Nezapomeneme, 1946): The Pathos of Never Forget" at Visible Evidence XXVI, the international conference on documentary film and media, on July 26, 2019 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. 

This paper examines one of the Holocaust documentaries made in Czechoslovakia just after the war; the short non-fiction film Lest We Forget (Nezapomeneme, Václav Švarc, 1946). It approaches “never forget,” an often used phrase in memorial rhetoric, as an ethical mandate to the representation of historical trauma,and thus particularly helpful for thinking about the Holocaust documentary. With this in mind, this paper argues that if Lest We Forget has a visceral impact, it is not only because it depicts the “spectacle” of atrocity footage, or because it promotes a particular political ideology, but also because it attests to the pathos inherent in the act of remembering.