Documentaries show the political within esthetics.

Film Festivals. In March Stockholm will host a festival for documentary films which strive to re-establish the link between humanity and the surrounding world.

Astrid Söderbergh Widding .
Cultural commentator for Svenska Dagbladet and professor of film studies at University of Stockholm

In a time when moral relativism occupies a position high on the totem pole in our society, it can scarcely seem opportune to speak about eternal and absolute values - about "the search for the truth about humanity" or "the beauty in truth". When Leo Kantor, at the helm of the organisational committee behind the fourth international documentary festival in Stockholm, Humanity in the World (March 17-20, 2005) dares to give voice to such words, this can therefore easily give rise to something of an uncertainty as to how they should be understood. Can one really say such things - and what's more, say them about the media of film, that medium more capable of manipulation than any other? This is hardly unproblematic. But Kantor's message, with its unshakeable confidence in humanistic values, its tribute to humanity's worth, has simultaneously deep roots in film history: here from the very beginning, along side of the sensationalism and the spectacle, there has also been a tradition which has relied on the media's unique ability to not just reflect, but rather also re-establish humanity's connections to the world around it, its belief in the world and in life.

The selection of films which are shown in the festival attacks human suffering in various aspects, as in the film Life Ahead of You (2003) about a Polish boarding school for blind children, where we learn something new: who knew previously that the world is slippery, rough, and dark? But several films also address difficult contemporary conflicts, as for example in Observed (2004), about the war between Serbs and Bosnians depicted through a handicapped volleyball match for players who have lost their legs to landmines.

The film Beslan (2004) also belongs to this group of films which comments on current societal problems. It is only eight minutes long, made by three teenage girls from the area around the school which suffered an act of terrorism in connection with the beginning of the school year in 2004. One of them, Zalina Bogazova, was herself a student in school number 1, and she lost her mother and her sister there. But what the film recounts is something entirely different than what one might expect. Journalism tends to strive - and legitimately enough, for therein lies its mission - to report the entire news, all the details which can possibly be gleaned about a catastrophe which has taken place. Intrusive reporting belongs to the realm of public property. One often speaks of the need to know exactly what has happened, about the demand by those affected to gain detailed knowledge of how their loved ones died, to be able to "get closure". As if knowledge acquired gradually of an unfathomable occurrence could counteract the hopeless loss.

Surprisingly, in Beslan Zalina Bogazova adopts the exact opposite position. She does not want, she says, to know exactly how her mother and her sister died. That would no longer be good for anything, quite simply because it does not help her, does not lead her forward. The only thing that counts right now is that she misses them, and the insight that despite everything, she herself must carry on. She shows deep respect here for the fact - as fundamental as it is ignored - that life as well as death is a mystery which utterly eludes human attempts at control. The only thing a person can control is what she does with her own grief and regret - and these three girls have chosen to make their film, as a contribution to the fight against terrorism. This miniature film therefore inspires hope, remarkably, right in the middle of its tragedy.

Another question which can easily arise in connection with the festival involves the degree of relevance of yet another Swedish film forum dedicated to the Holocaust. A nearly countless number of films on this theme, both fictitious and documentary, have already been produced and shown in every imaginable context - in theaters, at festivals, on television and at various special events, both in Sweden as well as internationally. That it is necessary to remind people of the Holocaust's reality is self-evident - as a counterweight to revisionism and denial of history. But the question is: can this not end up being too many images? Is there not a risk of the effect being the opposite - that history becomes fictionalized through all these images, where documentary and fiction so easily can blur together?

I must acknowledge that out of fear of becoming numb - to avoid getting desensitized - I myself try to avoid films about the Second World War and the Holocaust. Alain Resnais' Night and Fog, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: a small number of films have too permanently etched themselves into my retina and formed an inner image of the Holocaust in my consciousness. This inner image seems both sharper and more detailed than most of what can be provided through new outer impressions. Is this not enough? It is therefore not without a certain doubt that I now view a selection of festival films on this theme. But my misgivings are in vain.

The film which serves to inaugurate the festival bears the title The Silver Spoon (2004), directed by Polish director Michal Nekanda-Trepka. It opens with the image of a spoon with a name and date engraved on it, 5/1 42. In the film we meet Elzbieta Ficowska, the spoon's owner. It turns out to be the only memory she has left of her biological mother, who sent it along in the wooden box which was used to smuggle Elzbieta out from the ghetto at the age of six, to a new identity as a Christian Polish girl with a new mother. The poet Jerzy Ficowski's poignant poem "Your Two Mothers" ("Dina två mödrar"), translated to Swedish in 1987 by Rita and Erik Tornborg, with Per Arne Bodin's collaboration (in the anthology Reading in Ashes (Att läsa i Aska), is dedicated to his wife Elzbieta. She first understood the truth about her background at the age of seventeen. She shares her destiny with many: 5,000 Jewish children in Poland, who in similar ways were rescued from the Holocaust but who often know nothing about their biological families or even their own birthdates. Not less than 2,500 of these children were rescued from Warsaw's ghetto by a woman who is now 94 years old: Irena Sendler, who is portrayed and is herself present in the film. This is scarcely some kind of ground-breaking creation as far as film-making goes. But there is a tremendous simplicity and authenticity in this depiction which is striking. The account of the meeting with the American girls who after having written a school play about Sendler have decided to come search for her grave in Warsaw - and instead find her alive - is moving. They share the predicament of most spectators: not having been a part of things, lacking first-hand experience and therefore also being dependent upon others' stories, others' imparting of the incomprehensible truth which they have lived.

The film The Amateur Photographer, directed by Russian Irina Gedrovich (2004), once again poses the same complex of problems in a strongly contrasting light. It tells the story of Private Gerhardt, who after having earlier engaged himself in the Hitlerjugend like so many other contemporary Germans continues his trajectory as a soldier in the army of the Third Reich. In this capacity he eventually ends up in Soviet Russia. He falls in love with the region and dreams of a rural future there with his sweetheart. But today he would have most likely been forgotten if it hadn't been for his two companions on this journey - his camera and his diary. With their help he documented and recounted his everyday life; he described and captured in pictures both the surroundings and the people - not least of which the dramatic and violent encounters, such as when he shot an elderly Jew who went out with his yoke over his shoulders to fetch some water, but who didn't have a passport. The film builds to a great extent upon these still pictures, interwoven with photos of the diary. The soundtrack contains excerpts from the text, whose non-flowery depiction with its nearly unbearably sober tone can seem shocking at times. I am a bit sceptical of the bilingualism, which creates a certain long-windedness in the depiction - the diary excerpts are rendered namely first in German and then in Russian translation. But for all its impartial ordinariness the film provides a unique insight into the reality of war, where shooting has become trivial, where killing is a duty, while simultaneously the longing for a "normal life" somewhere on the other side keeps one's courage up. But the life which the film's central figure thought he had realized after the war, in East Berlin, turned out to be illusory, and the conclusion totally logical - in 1956 Gerhardt was imprisoned and executed by the Russians. What The Amateur Photographer succeeds at is a nearly harrowing neutrality in its portrayal, precisely because it takes place with its starting point in the guise of a narrative I, a central figure beyond good and evil, himself both victim and perpetrator.

Among the films about Hitler's Germany, Oliver Axer and Susanne Benzes' Hitler's Hit Parade (2003) is probably the most spectacular - and definitely the most original. It is hardly a conventional documentary, rather - as a subtitle indicates - "a composition in image and sound". Here we are presented with a collage of unique images from Hitler's Germany, everything from glamorous artistic performances to cartoons, such as the derogatory portrait of the elderly Jew who goes out in the woods and robs a tree of its golden leaves. On the soundtrack once again we hear period music. Zarah Leander sings famous songs - "Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh'n", and "Drei Sterne sah ich scheinen" - both as classic as seldom seen recordings from UFA-Tonfilm. But there is also a series of new interpretations of melodies from that period. Texts - several well-known slogans from this time, such as "Freude durch Kraft", or "Blühendes Land" - simultaneously present images or serve as counterpoints to them.

Already from the start Hitler's Hit Parade places itself in medias res, and thus gives the viewer unique and first-hand insights into the esthetic of the Third Reich. If previously-published books on this theme have had a tendency to devote a lot of time to, for example, architecture or art - the kinds of things which readily allow themselves to be captured in the from of still pictures - the moving images here provide new perspectives. Not the least, the cult of the machine is highlighted, the worship of speed and modernity - phenomena which tend more often to be associated with Fascist Italy, but which, it is shown here, are at least as important in Nazism's cultural industry, which finds itself "right in the middle of a technological and cultural upswing where modernity and culture such as music, dance, film, and theater occupy a central place", as it reads in the film description. At the same time it is obvious that the development is far from neutral or innocent. Step by step National Socialism's values sneak their way onto and gradually take over the whole stage.

A little ways into the film a decisive turning point also takes place, seemingly as imperceptible as fatal. A woman is sitting and reading on a park bench, while her dog makes off with her baby carriage. A soldier observes the whole thing, and reunites the child and dog with the slightly shamefaced mother. In the next image we then see another woman pushing an identical baby carriage - but now in the ghetto instead, and with a star of David fastened on her coat. From this moment on we also catch glimpses of the effects of Nazism's apparently so generally held visual rhetoric all the more often in the story. This effect becomes at times cruelly ironic in its contrastive power, as when the advertisement for the German railway - "Millionen fahren Reichsbahn" - is juxtaposed with the image of the train transports to the camps.

One after another of the festival's films reminds us that esthetics and politics are and will remain inextricably intimately interwoven. One who imagines that esthetics is a harmless phenomenon somewhere peripheral to central developments in society has completely missed the point. This is the moral which must be taken from films such as Hitler's Hit Parade. And the general dismantling of the Humanities by Swedish society today - and not least the esthetic domains - to the benefit of the apparent common good, stands out thus in the end also as entirely fatal: signs of an attitude as naïve as it is historically baseless.