Peter Forgacs, ‘The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle’

Peter Forgacs’ documentary, The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, represents the Jewish Peereboom family as compared to the German Nazi family, the Seyss-Inquarts. The similarities Forgacs highlights between the two families’ home videos are the driving force for the film, and given the historical context (through dating and including archival footage of historical events alongside the chronology of these families’ stories), these similarities are extremely powerful (Forgacs, 1991).

It is quite obvious while watching the film that Forgacs has edited the home videos to add to his story. Like Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1987), the film certainly “bear[s] the imprint” of the director, and for this reason it in some ways controversial (Morris as quoted in Williams, 13). Although The Maelstrom can be acquainted with The Thin Blue Line in regards to its substantial use of style, it differs from Morris’ film in that it would not likely categorize as a “new documentary” in Linda Williams’ view. Forgacs does not give his audience the overwhelming sense that there is an “inaccessibility of a moment of crimeâÂ?¦ irretrievably located in the past”Ã? (Williams, 17). The audience automatically sides with the Peereboom family in the witness of weddings, days at the beach, and watching the babies grow older (Renov, 5). The Seyss-Inquart family, in turn, is not given their say in the matter; they automatically act as antagonists and are used as tools to demonstrate the irony in the Nazi orders, through Forgacs’ mirroring of the two families. He lays it all out for the audience by telling us what to think. This would not fall under the category of “new documentary,” but as previously mentioned, the elements of style – and the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction as a result -are qualities of “new documentaries.”Ã?

As discussed by Michael Renov, the flow of the images is regularly punctuated by freeze frames (Renov, 5); in my opinion, this not only overtly declares the kind of secondary revision that these images have been subjected to, but further, the features of the film become an argument about the processes by which historical knowledge is applied in documentary film. The freeze frames within the film implicate their importance, and general function, as photographic portraits. I would argue this kind of freezing connects the moving images to the power of photography itself: the power to hold a physical record of the past, and in this sense the images act as death-shrines and implicate the past-ness of the characters. They are removed from the forward flow of time. Of course, the film stops the frames only for a moment, long enough to note a detail, a gesture, or a look (Renov, 5). It is just long enough to transform the nature of our desires and of our interest in these images. It freezes their movement long enough, perhaps, to provoke the reflection that is what connects the audience to the characters.

Renov also mentions briefly the use of tinting in the film (Renov, 4). Although I cannot be sure to what extent Forgacs edited the film in this way, the use of colour is effective not only in making separate scenes distinguishable from one another, especially when displayed in sequence, but it is also effective in that it separates the two families, almost as if they are coming from two different worlds, just as they are coming from two different mindsets.

In Sylvie Lindeberg’s article, “Night and Fog: Inventing a Perspective,” she reflects, “different readings and uses of the film would nevertheless change their meaning” (Lindeberg, 77). In The Maelstrom, Forgacs brings attention to specific aspects of the families’ lives and decides not to show other aspects. In nearly all documentary films, the director has a choice in what to show and what to leave out, and this is especially important to consider when looking at The Maelstrom. Imagine if the documentary were to have portrayed only the Seyss-Inquart family with added comments and evidence concerning the “manipulative”/”brain-washing” power of Nazi authorities. This would show a perspective of the Nazis that we are not accustomed to seeing in films; it would show that the Nazis (as opposed to the Jews) were real human beings, with real lives, and not the bloodthirsty monsters we are shown in many Holocaust films. I am not making a claim about the Nazis here, by any means, but I am demonstrating that the overall message of a documentary film can change drastically if the director were to choose different clips to display in his/her film.

References

Forgacs, Peter. The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle. 1991.

Lindeberg, Sylvie. “Night and Fog: Inventing a Perspective”. UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004

formerly eScholarship Editions. Vol. 46, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 9-21. http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft5h4nb36j&chunk.id=d0e7137&toc.depth=1&brand=ucpress

Renov, Michael. “Historical Discourses of the Unimaginable: Peter Forgacs’ The Maelstrom”. http://www.forgacspeter.hu/english/bibliography/Historical+Discourses+of+the+Unimaginable%3A+Peter+Forgacs’+The+Maelstrom+/22

Williams, Linda. “Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary”. Film Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Spring, 1993), pp. 9-21. https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/visualizing/attachments/20120423/2d3a453e/attachment-0003.pdf