| This dissertation examines how the documentary landscape changes when the interviewees' credibility is at stake---as is the case with perpetrator interviews. In others words, what happens when the film leads us to distrust the interviewee? Or when, although the interviewee may claim to speak the truth, we think or know otherwise? Or when the testimony we are privy to is rife with prevarications, partial truths and denials?;I argue that to take on these questions we need a different way to analyze interview-based documentaries? through examination of the filmic space. The documentary interview's filmic space, as I am conceiving it, arises from a combination of the interviewee's words and performance, the interventions of the interviewer (questions, tone of voice, body language etc.), the choices made by the filmmaker (staging, camerawork, lighting, editing etc.) and the viewer's attitude and assumptions. These forces can work in concert to create an impression of unity when we trust the interviewee; or they can pull in separate directions, giving rise to a space that we experience as ruptured, layered, fragmented, haunted or uncanny. The filmic space of the documentary interview is always shifting as a result of the interplay between word and image. It bears resemblance to the profilmic, but is not the same. Rather, it comes into being only in its unfolding, requiring the viewer to complete it. In this process a new visual space is created, which differs from that of a face-to-face unmediated encounter.;While trustworthy interviewees tend to be filmic space unifiers (with them, the setting recedes to the background and appears cohesive), untrustworthy interviewees are potent space disturbers. In my study of interview documentaries, I focus on denial in subjects implicated in historical atrocities, chiefly the Holocaust. Interviews with perpetrators teem with disruptive potential; in the Western world the Nazi remains the ultimate perpetrator. Furthermore the testimonial form and the Holocaust have been intertwined since the Adolf Eichmann trial. I examine how the filmic interview space carries with it the imprint of Holocaust documentaries when it moves to other atrocities---most powerfully, the Israeli occupation of Palestine. |
