Paper from the Conference “Current Issues in European Cultural Studies”, organised by the Advanced Cultural
Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS) in Norrköping 15-17 June 2011. Conference Proceedings published by
Linköping University Electronic Press: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp_home/index.en.aspx?issue=062. © The Author.
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On Foreclosure and Fresh Cherries
Teodor Ajder
non affiliated
doru28@yahoo.com
This is an attempt to put a video-art work - Świeże wiśnie (Fresh cherries) by
Anna Baumgart to a critical test proposed by the film critic Serge Daney
1
. Daney
formulates his axiom while discussing a number of films that emerged in Europe
as a result of the Holocaust experience. He claims that an author creating a film
dealing with such a theme should not place beauty before the just; the author
should endow the film with the honesty to acknowledge the impossibility of tell-
ing a story - the stopping point in the course of history, when storytelling freezes
or runs idle, and finally, such a film should not be speaking about amnesia or
repression, but rather about foreclosure, that is a hallucinatory return to the real of
something upon which it was impossible to place a “judgment of reality”.
1
In this paper I cite extensively from Postcards from the cinema, Serge Daney talks with Paul Grant. 2007.
Berg Publishers.
“To see one must take a position. “
Georges Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position. L'œil de l'histoire, 1