The question whether the Holocaust can be represented through fiction has haunted filmmakers and scholars for decades, perhaps most famously by Claude Lanzmann’s insistence that this extreme event resists representation altogether.

Holofiction faces the question with surprising self-evidence by compositing all the fictional images that cinema has already produced. Drawing on more than 3,000 fiction films and television productions made between the late 1930s and the present, Polish-German filmmaker Michal Kosakowski constructed a feature-length montage in which recurring visual motifs gradually emerge. Cattle cars, striped uniforms, barbed wire, selections on the platform, the gates of Auschwitz: repeated across decades of filmmaking, these images reveal how a cinematic vocabulary has taken shape.

While Holofiction recalls certain tendencies of structural cinema, Kosakowski’s work is also motivated by reflection and critical inquiry: he describes his interest as less an investigation of individual films than of the collective image archive they have produced and that continues to shape historical consciousness today. Without dismissing fiction’s capacity to bear witness, Holofiction also asks us what happens when representation itself becomes conventionalised. It demonstrates how cinema continuously constructs and reconstructs the past, but rather than closing the discussion, it invites viewers to look again at images they may have thought they knew.

TW