EMPTY SPACE. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STRATEGIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILMS ON HOLOCAUST (Puste miejsce. Strategie autobiograficzne w filmie dokumentalnym o Zagladzie)

Autobiographism relies on a kind of agreement with a viewer, listener or reader on basis of which culture text is deciphered as a record of an author's experience. It can be understood only when an artist's biography is known and functions in society. As Maka-Malatynska argues, autobiographical convention is rarely used in documentary films on Holocaust, which appears to be a consequence of psychological resistance to describing own experiences and overwhelming power of images in which the past is brought back to life. In the strict sense only a few films represent this trend in documentary cinema. An autobiography, an experience of a Holocaust is a theme in films by Mira Hamermesh and Marian Marzynski. In broader sense documentaries co-created by Survivors in which they are protagonists and narrators and where their stories determine film construction can be treated a autobiographical, e.g. 'Miejsce urodzenia' (Birthplace) by Pawel Lozinski (1992). More frequently autobiographical motifs are used in fiction films, although in such case they are not autobiographical in a narrow sense. Filmmakers, like Roman Polanski in Pianist (2002), hide behind someone else's story telling about their own experiences and emotions at the same time.