The Landscape as a Silent Witness of a Fragile Memory in Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 Film Ida

Abstract

This article focuses on Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida, analysing how the formal and aesthetic aspects question silent witnesses about the difficult past using pictures as a useful testifier. In the context of Poland’s national memory, its current political discourse and the Polish-Jewish relations during World War II, Ida offers a significant contribution. The process of scrutinising this difficult past becomes a journey, a troublesome event when a remembrance must be constructed and experienced. The film journey offers a possibility to get back to this period of time and encourages us to pose certain questions: how do sites of memory remain with us through cinematographic or photographic representations? How can we define this physical and mental landscape of the journey as being a fragile memory? Drawing on Carlo Ginzburg’s index paradigm, the author proceeds to reflect upon the traumatic events of the Holocaust in the Polish landscape through two important photographic moments related to cinema.