Dialogues in resistance in See You Soon Again

A linguist by training, a media theorist, and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, Bernadette Wegenstein is also the director of several feature-length documentaries. Among her favored themes: the relationship that takes shape between the image of the individual body and social space as an organic whole; uprooting, which passes as much through geographical or cultural dislocation as through a non-belonging to oneself (notably on account of a failure to recognize one’s own physical characteristics following a trauma); testimony as a rhetorical device capable of encouraging the unfolding of a non-linear, even “branching” narrative. On closer inspection, this last question is not limited to the occasional return of a motif but structures the body of work around a genuine common denominator.

If, in her written output, such a preoccupation passes essentially through questions tied to the medical world, and to bioethics in particular¹, in her films it is relayed by the analysis of a twofold transmission: that of History, as a sign of collective rallying, and that of the stories that forge individual and familial narrative identity. This is the case in Made Over in America (2007) and The Good Breast (2016), two films of divergent approaches in which, through the encounter with an array of protagonists involved in the practice of cosmetic surgery (patients and doctors), an entire swath of American society is examined; and all the more so in Devoti tutti (currently in production) and See You Soon Again (2011), marked by the attempt to describe the inner workings of one or several microcosms by drawing on the accounts, codified to varying degrees, of those who inhabit them.

Devoted to the cult of Saint Agatha in the Sicilian city of Catania, Devoti tutti investigates the ways in which a founding myth can be reactivated, even instrumentalized, according to the needs of individuals and institutions. See You Soon Again, for its part, makes an event that has become paradigmatic signify according to the contexts with which it enters into resonance or conflict. Set in Baltimore, the director’s adopted city, where a large African American population, a pool of students and academics, and one of the Jewish communities in the United States with the highest concentration of Shoah survivors all coexist, the narrative of this film follows the wanderings of two survivors, Leo Bretholz and Bluma Shapiro, engaged in a continuous testimonial activity before a school-age public. Two different itineraries, two different ways as well of conceiving the address to the other, but an exchange made possible by the persistence, in each of the interlocutors, of one and the same difficulty in setting speech in circulation. Whether with the adolescents in middle- and high-school classrooms, with the people encountered in the course of commemorative ceremonies, or with those who belong to the immediate family circle, the sharing of lived experience runs up endlessly against a form of reciprocal resistance to the possibility of seeing through, to the very end, a significantly displaced point of view. It is true that, throughout the film, the impossibility of a dialogue properly speaking haunts the characters as much as the spectator; and yet the question is not that of an unsayable contingent upon the very act of communicating, but of the way in which the form conferred on discourse does or does not determine its efficacy — in other words, its bearing on the real. It is from this observation that Bernadette Wegenstein combines the images and the essential of the interviews collected, making editing a tool capable of complicating the interactions that her camera captures, shapes, or suggests.

Speech seized

Inscribed within a script that “sketches” more than it directs, the sequences meant to establish a bond between the spectator and the witnesses — presented as possible “models” before this vision is nuanced by prosaic contact with their daily life — are often moments caught on the fly, at the mercy of the situations encountered. The position of “heroes” in which the two principal figures find themselves placed, both as subjects of the film and through the kind of attention paid to them by the audiences they usually face (in secondary schools, in synagogues, on radio or television programs), is constantly called into question by the spontaneous reactions of each, which tend to escape any attempt at framing. On closer inspection, the director could have done without integrating these scenes into the film as it was distributed (all the more so since the people concerned sometimes explicitly request it of her); that said, it is precisely in this desacralization of a witness become “man bearing witness” that the complexity of the points of view woven by the film resides, along with the ambivalent relation that we, the recipients of the work, may maintain toward these interlocutors who are, all in all, not always as perfect as their role would seem to demand. Just as one can read Primo Levi’s Si c’est un homme (If This Is a Man) not only as a reference to the humanity of the individual brought low by the experience of the camps, but as an invitation to consider the one who speaks as a “fellow human,” beyond the particular authority with which his experience invests the survivor, the enunciative existence of Leo Bretholz and Bluma Shapiro exceeds their activity of transmission alone. Thus it happens that they show themselves impatient, peremptory, even disagreeable, this being still more evident when they address the director directly to comment, as if in an aside, on their relation to the environment in which they are being filmed.

In Bluma’s case, this theatricalization of what stirs her conscience manifests on a more discreet plane, not always verbal. When her granddaughter visits her (no doubt because of the filming) and likewise calls herself, not without a certain pride, a “survivor,” the grandmother firmly sets aside this dubious assimilation and underscores her disagreement with an eloquent grimace, undeniably encouraged by the presence of the camera. The same goes when, encouraged by Leo’s attitude, she places herself with him in a situation of complicity that dissociates them from the discourses circulating around them. This is particularly evident at the moment when, invited to the opening of an exhibition that retraces, among other things, their respective biographies, they break away from the group to criticize at once the inaccuracy of the captions accompanying certain photos, the ostentatious and circumstantial emotionality of a few visitors, and the conventional observations with which most of those present favor them.

Leo, for his part, defends himself against the gap between the place from which he speaks and the frame of reference in which the “others” are situated through the recurrent use of sarcasm, which comes, for example, to punctuate his reading of the letters that many adolescents send him, encouraged by their teachers. Although these letters were written under the constraint of a school exercise, he judges their form and content severely: he reproaches them, on the one hand, for their approximations, and on the other, for their unsuited register. He does not hesitate to formulate his judgments in confrontation with the camera, in a manner that, to be sure, seeks the director’s approval, but sets aside a certain segment of the public, potentially charged with the same superficiality. What the witness perceives with accuracy is a misuse of language that wounds him in his desire for interlocution, but for which, paradoxically, he becomes responsible as well in other circumstances.

The terminology and the formulations he uses can indeed lend themselves to confusion, provoking misunderstandings that hinder the possibility of an exchange and multiply the risks of false conceptions, especially before an uninformed public. His insistence that the Shoah constitutes a unicum is equally problematic². By implying that any effort to set it in relation with other catastrophes of exceptional scale — even when it does not aim to establish analogies, but rather to make available a vaster store of knowledge and tools of analysis — is an offense to his own experience, Leo misses out on authentic dialogues, ending up feeding debates whose excesses can prove dangerous. All the more so since, if comparison itself carries its perils, to censor in advance the brain’s propensity to interpret the world in terms of rapprochements, distinctions, and repetitions amounts to depriving oneself of the possibility of testing their pertinence by following the movement of thought through to the end. Yes — because in order to manage to “compare what is comparable,” one must be practiced in the exercise and display a subtlety that can be acquired only through assiduous practice and, as far as possible, integrated into a course of learning that is pertinently interdisciplinary.

Weaving the bonds, fabricating a weft

It happens that Leo runs up against students sincerely desirous of exchanging with him, notably by bringing in their own family vicissitudes, sometimes with a very heavy legacy. This is what happens with Francis Kim, who is reproached for establishing connections between the tragic history of his grandfather, whose youth was violently marked by the abuses suffered in North Korea, and the enterprise of reifying individuals as it was made explicit in the context of Nazi genocidal policy. Far from wanting to conflate experiences about which he was able to inform himself only through books and audiovisual media, Francis Kim (whose name preserves the trace of the founding identity division of his existence) seems to seek to draw nearer to an interlocutor who, like him, knows at close range a feeling of uprooting, deterritorialization, and loss, though for undeniably very different reasons. To the young boy’s always very cautious proposals, Leo responds by cutting things short: because he is intimately convinced in advance of the inadequacy of the words addressed to him, and no doubt also because he anticipates his own difficulty in keeping calm in the face of assertions that, willfully or not, call his deepest convictions into question; because he seems to want to speak to the students rather than with them, in short, he misses out on the possibility of a constructive dialogue. This missed opportunity occupies a very important place in the film — whose interest also lies in the way it thematizes the failure inherent in any asymmetrical dialogue — and rightly so, it echoes the incomprehension that follows from the dialogues between Leo — whose intransigence too often leans toward dogmatism — and the young African Americans he meets in certain classrooms.

Always respectful, but understandably disconcerted by the way Leo receives their reflections on the history of slavery (and the place it occupies in the collective memory of a country where the notion of the melting pot often serves as compensation for an unassumed feeling of guilt), the latter struggle with the means at their disposal to make their voices heard without thereby wounding the sensibility of the witness par excellence. Avoiding recourse to the often vague notion of “competition of memories,” they nonetheless try to share a suffering whose memory is still burning³ and seek to understand why, in different eras, in places far removed from one another, some could have been despoiled of everything, including their dignity. Their speaking out is all the more significant in a hinge-state such as Maryland — too far north to have known the phenomena of mass enslavement due to the presence of plantations, too far south to be completely and definitively absolved of them — which remains marked by perilous and disheartening forms of self-stigmatization within the Black community⁴.

It is not only the historical rapprochements that these particular students propose, but the actualization that such bridges might implicitly elicit, that put Leo on the defensive; for him, it is perhaps less a matter of denying the possibility of such a recurrence than of exorcising the anguish of seeing the same event repeat itself identically, and affect him anew just as irremediably. Let us note that the transgenerational question takes varied forms in the consciousness of Leo and Bluma, revealing preoccupations that, without ever becoming the object of a debate between the two, can prove contradictory. Indeed, whereas she shows herself above all reticent in the face of the exacerbation of the concept of “second (or even third) generation” trauma that her granddaughter allusively lays claim to, this is not at all what seems to bother Leo, rather embarrassed by what he calls “connecting stories,” comprising both the hollow responses, determined by their phatic function alone, and the genuine attempts to think violence as transversal.

One may wonder how the notion of “multidirectional memory,” unknown to the protagonists of the film but assuredly mastered by the director, works upon the matter of See You Soon Again. The expression, introduced by Michael Rothberg, “emphasizes one of the principal characteristics of memory, namely its tendency to reconstitute the bygone through the selection of elements within the targeted chronological frame and association with other stories, at the risk — assumed or not, and more or less controlled — of yielding to anachronism⁵.” If the introduction of this concept aims to blur the thesis of the Shoah’s absolute historical singularity, it does not, however, reduce the scope of the event, as the drastic discourses that tense certain theorists — and certain survivors — around the exceptional uniqueness of the genocide of the Jews would seem to fear. Although never made explicit in the film, the idea that the memory of any historical violence can be conjugated with others, setting in motion unexpected “resources of solidarity,” acts like an underlying logical operator. Thus surfaces the possibility that the singularity of the Shoah imposed itself on minds precisely on account of “the numerous bonds that had previously been established with the memory of other histories of violence⁶”; in the arrangement of the dialogues and the positions of meaning, one sees emerge the critical orientation assumed — as a hypothesis more than as genuine certainty — by Bernadette Wegenstein. The latter works each transition in a way that makes the public complicit in what it sees, both through its inclusion in the movement of the narrative and through its active participation in the interpretation of it. To the sometimes difficult circulation of speech among the different protagonists are thus added other forms of exchange, situated not only on the plane of the public’s anticipated reception of the work, but also on that of the filmmaker’s introspective dialogue with herself, rendered still more palpable by the presence of her co-director, Lukas Stepanik⁷. Although this dual direction remains invisible in the script — nothing suggests that the people filmed might have two different persons before them when they address the camera directly — it appears in the opening and closing credits and shapes in depth the interlocutory dimension of the work.

Behind the scenes

The implicit models that inspire Bernadette Wegenstein’s work — that of cinéma-vérité in particular — add yet another dimension to the dialogic interaction, suggesting associations that, provided they are grasped by the one viewing the film, multiply the possible strata of meaning. The parallel between the approach adopted and the one that presides over the construction of the documentary Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), co-directed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch in 1960, is striking in this regard, all the more so since the particular conditions induced by collaborative creation bring into play similar narrative problematics. On closer inspection, the reading Michael Rothberg proposes of Chronique d’un été is at once problematized and amplified by the work carried out in See You Soon Again: here too, it is a matter of showing how the reconciliation of memorial narratives distant in space and in time, even possibly competing, can prove productive even in their clashing relations.

Rouch and Morin’s documentary is articulated around a scripted inquiry into the mores of the French in the aftermath of the Second World War, undertaken from “devices of friendly encounter” that approach the other in a mode that departs from the critical distance imposed on the researcher by positivist thought. The scene that takes place in the restaurant of the Musée de l’Homme, in the presence of a former deportee whose “clumsiness was heavy with prejudice,” particularly drew Rothberg’s attention; he remarks that, at the moment when “the conversation among the assembled friends turns to the battles then unfolding in the Belgian Congo and to the feeling of solidarity that Landry, as an Ivorian, feels toward the Congolese,” something comes loose such that “wars of decolonization and the memory of the Shoah short-circuit […] in an unexpected way.” There one indeed sees manifestly revealed the mutual ignorance, possibly doubled by mistrust, that divides the representatives of each of the cultural groups present. The disjunction appears “first in the form of an embarrassed preterition: Marceline Loridan, responding to […] Landry, declares — though the example, in her view, is ‘not quite… quite… right’ — that in the event of antisemitic manifestations, she would feel solidarity with all the Jews of the world”; before continuing in “an intense moment where the two Africans present are questioned about the meaning of the tattoo on Marceline’s arm,” of which they know nothing. Far from staging a communicational failure, the film moves beyond the discordances thus exposed; indeed, “favored by Jean Rouch’s capacity to make alterity or the unexpected emerge in the everyday (this is how James Clifford defines the surrealist ethnography with which the director was steeped during his youth), the ‘discordant proximity’ between the history of the deported Jews and that of the colonized peoples leads [in this case] to a dialogue [admittedly] halting [but] from which each of the histories [evoked] draws a beneficial memorial dynamic.”

Not only does See You Soon Again have recourse to similar situations in order to probe the often painful experiences of individual and national memory, but the exchanges between the two witnesses also mirror a comparable type of interaction, insofar as the accounts of Bluma and Leo arise from an encounter of worlds that only retrospective schematization seems to manage to fuse within one and the same diegetic configuration. This is what emerges from a series of oppositions that, at bottom, are merely relative: to the Polish Jewish woman, survivor of the camps of Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz, corresponds the Viennese man who, having escaped deportation by jumping from a moving train, crossed the war hiding from one country to another; the benevolent discourse of Bluma, who takes the podium only with a certain reluctance and remains, all in all, always discreet, finds, moreover, its inverted reflection in the firm assurance of a Leo who has made of testimony almost a profession. The latter, although he displays a certain repugnance in the face of the attention of which he is constantly the object, seems in fact to appreciate the authority conferred on him by his enthronement by American institutions and the American public as the witness-type, with all the contradictions that entails.

The media frenzy that accompanies the generalization of the testimonial practice is the object of an analysis that translates, on the plane of form, into a stripped-down style and a “montage by correspondences” whose rhythm departs noticeably from the one to which the public has been habituated since the 1990s by the proliferation of “debate programs.” Moreover, the refusal to fix any sort of testimonial deposition in a static shot conceived ad hoc to immortalize the function of the speaker and to claim the importance of a direct address to the audience, off-screen, goes in the direction of a distancing from the television report that, too often, confines itself to a normed form, to the detriment of the emergence of a living and singular speech. Against the interpretations imposed by narrative strategies that, transforming the witness’s account into voice-over, make of his speech the commentary on images chosen a posteriori by the director (and the scriptwriters), Bernadette Wegenstein decides not to have recourse to the filmic or photographic archives that might introduce something other than the present of the testimony taking place and convey, in an invasive manner, one interpretation among others. The reference — by contrast — to this media activity contested by the very découpage of the film finds an illustration thematized by the way the welcoming of the witnesses is organized in the most privileged schools of Baltimore: at John Carroll Catholic high school, notably, Leo’s intervention is integrated into the television newscast on the establishment’s self-managed channel, and interspersed with weather forecasts, even circumstantial jingles.

Bernadette Wegenstein, if she problematizes such practices, does so knowingly: the author of several scholarly contributions devoted to the function of the media in the public space, she also brushed against a career as a cultural columnist in Austria, her country of origin. The presence of her personal history, without being directly addressed in any of her films, works upon the questions of See You Soon Again, where the collision of multiple memories functions very certainly as a mirror of the uprootings that punctuate her own course. The scholarly investigation is thus doubled by a more introspective dimension and blurs the dialogic component intrinsic to the collaboration with Lukas Stepanik, who acts rather as producer and consultant. That said, the sentences in German addressed by Leo to the camera do not furnish enough elements to determine clearly the identity of the addressee, the latter wanting to remain, as far as possible, a plural and ungraspable subject.

At the same time as it materializes an idea of a dialogue possibly defective and yet necessary, if only to define the frame within which it can take place, the film by Bernadette Wegenstein and Lukas Stepanik is also a “dialogued work,” resulting from a process of continuous interaction between the two bearers of the project. And if at moments the singularity of one seems to gain the upper hand over that of the other, this allows us better to observe the role played by the presence of a second party, in regard to which the first expresses itself. In any type of collective enunciation, the acceptance of such an observation is at once proof and contestation of its pertinence; in fact, the metanarrative orientation of the film renders this process intelligible without making it the object of a discourse too thoroughly developed, which would needlessly weigh down the underlying argument.

Notes