On Foreclosure and Fresh Cherries
On Foreclosure and Fresh Cherries

Summary/Abstract: This is an attempt to put a video artwork – Świeże wiśnie [Fresh cherries] by Anna Baumgart to a critical test proposed by the film critic Serge Daney1. Daney formulated it while discussing a number of films that emerged in Europe as a result of the Holocaust experience. He claims that first, an author creating a film dealing with such a theme should not place beauty before the just; second, the author should honestly acknowledge the impossibility of telling the story – the stopping point in the course of history, when storytelling freezes or runs idle, and finally, such a film should not be talking about amnesia or repression, but rather about foreclosure, that is a hallucinatory return to the reality of something upon which it was impossible to place a ’judgment of reality’.

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