Research Statement

The film Two Emperors and a Queen has been produced as central element of my practice-as-research PhD project ‘The River Danube as a Holocaust Landscape: Journey of the Kladovo Transport’, set between the departments of Film & TV and History at the University of Bristol. I am especially interested in utilising cinematic media as a way of probing ideas around movement and temporality and would like to invite viewers to consider the interplay of these in the film. The work is virtually in its entirety presented in split-screen in order to highlight the layering of different temporalities relating to the narrative (see Methods section below). It is best viewed on a large screen in a single sitting.

Research Questions

Two Emperors and a Queen (re)traces the journey of the Kladovo transport – a group of Jewish refugees from central Europe – through the camera lens. Their entire journey was marked by striking relations to time, starting from its overall duration of more than two years (from 1939 to 1941-42) dominated by stasis rather than movement. The group derived its name from the Serbian town of Kladovo where their trip came to a prolonged halt. After nine months there the group was moved to Šabac, another Serbian town, where, nearly another year later, their persecutors caught up with them (during the summer of 1941). Virtually all the men from the Kladovo transport were executed in Zasavica near Šabac in October 1941, while the women and children were transported to a concentration camp in Belgrade in January 1942 and killed in a gas van, during the following spring. The sole survivors were some 200 young people who obtained legal certificates to leave Yugoslavia for Palestine shortly before the outbreak of war in April 1941 and a small number of others who left the group autonomously.

In approaching this historical narrative, I use film (as time-based media) because of its situatedness within time (Bazin 2005), in order to explore the journey of the Kladovo transport as a multi-temporal event. Focusing on the refugees’ movements and their experience of the long duration spent in liminal spaces marked by the Danube waters, I wish to understand and unpack the relationship between the riverscape and the trauma they experienced. I seek to map out their journey and the layers of time that provide a tangible link between the ‘now’ – when my research takes place – and ‘then’ – the historical moment of the journey of the Kladovo transport between 1939 and 1942. Drawing also on Deleuze’s notion of ‘cinematic idea’ and using chunks of ‘movement–duration’ as cinematic building blocks (Delueze 1998) in thinking how to tell the history of the Kladovo transport, my project aims to explore different temporal registers inherent in this narrative. Specifically, I am interested in the collision between the sound (voice-over) that communicates archival texts and the images of the locations in their contemporary appearance. I seek out ways in which this collision provides opportunities for experiential engagement with the past.

To address these concerns my study is organised around the following research questions:

1. How does the cinematic experience, based on this historical narrative, contribute to gaining new knowledge on the subject in the context of contemporary modes of academic practice and research?

2. How does the camera inscribe the physicality of the journey of the Kladovo transport as an historical map of the Holocaust?

3. How do artistic media create a tangible thread between different temporalities that both link and separate the then, the now and the meanwhile; implying the period between the moment when my research takes place and the past that the project aims to investigate?

4. In what ways does the sharing of the same places between different actors, times and temporalities, offer a shared platform for a more immersive engagement with the past?

Context

My film borrows its title from the first publication on the Kladovo transport, Naftali Bata Gedalja’s text ‘Dva cara i jedna kraljica’ (‘Two Emperors and a Queen’), published in the Jewish Almanac 1957-58. The title refers to the names of the three vessels, ‘Emperor Dušan’, ‘Tsar Nikolai II’ and ‘Queen Maria’, on which the refugees travelled down the Danube and lived, moored in Kladovo for about six months in 1939/40.

Previous research has approached the Kladovo transport as a Holocaust narrative and mainly discussed it from a socio-political perspective (Anderl & Manoschek 2001; Jovanović 1979; Lebl 1997; Mihajlović & Mitrović 2006). In contrast to this, my project suggests another perspective framed through artistic media and, more specifically, documentary film. Although several artists have tackled this historical narrative in their art works (Alisa Douer in art installation, Mirjana Dragić Lehner in painting, Nikola Radić Lucati in photography), my work brings forth the narrative in a novel way, especially considering the time, depth of analyses and the unique academic-artistic research frame that the practice-based PhD has provided.

My research expands on previous work on the Kladovo transport by including an interdisciplinary body of knowledge. My particular contribution can be viewed within the context of creative/artistic modes of academic knowledge (Jones et al 2009; Nelson 2009, 2013) and within the growing field of Holocaust geographies (Cole 2016; Gigliotti 2009; Knowles et al 2014). Offering alternative, more experiential and visceral engagement with the history of the Kladovo transport, than is generally the case in Holocaust research, my work adds an artistic dimension to scholarly engagements with places and spaces of the past. It therefore responds to Holocaust scholar Andrew Charlesworth’s recommendation to follow the cinematic gaze in creative approaches to the spatiality of the past (Charlesworth 2004).

Within the context of academic practice-as-research (PaR) I explore my subject matter, raise and discuss my research questions through artistic practice. By doing so, I am joining the growing community of practitioners in the academy that challenge or contribute to the diversity of ways to engage with knowledge. Particularly important sources of inspiration throughout the process of my doctoral studies were: Jill Daniels’ Not Reconciled (2009) and Cahal McLaughlin’s work on the Maze and Long Kesh Prison (2004 – ). They are both based on mediating traumatic experience related to conflict, drawn from historical subject matters and raise research questions through practice in a similar way to my project. Furthermore, in both these examples, locations, places and landscapes take a predominant role. The relationship between the camera and the physicality of these places, as well as the way in which the presence of the camera indicates the presence of the subject, i.e. the author/researcher, is of great significance.

Daniels’s work breaks the silence of the ruins of Belchite (a town left in ruins after the Spanish civil war) with the voice over that is whispered by two spectres, two ‘surrogate witnesses’ (Daniels 2014, 5) who, by the virtue of their elusive presence in the film, speak for the absence in the historical world. Although I approach my subject matter differently, in the sense that I am not creating fictional characters in my film, I drew from Daniels’s work in thinking about the tension between the sound and the image in responding to the silence of the places where trauma had been experienced. While Belchite was left in ruins deliberately, the locations encountered by the Kladovo transport along their journey slipped into oblivion, unmarked, possibly as a result of neglect in a different socio-political context to that of Spain. Nonetheless, both in Belchite and locations in Kladovo, Šabac and Belgrade, the primarily ruinous places seem to evoke another time that they have witnessed and are now tacitly signalling through their physical properties. This is why it was instructive to refer to ‘Not reconciled’ in deciding how to record the locations in my film.

Methods

In the filmmaking process I specifically identified the following three research methods:

1. Doing/un-doing history

The script for Two Emperors and a Queen is composed of excerpts from letters, memoires and documents written by the members of the Kladovo transport, or immediate witnesses to their journey, with the exception of the cineaste, Stanoje Backo Aleksić. Some of the material I collected myself from a number of archives, while other parts are taken from Anderl and Manoscheck’s (2001) Gescheiterte Flucht, Reich’s (2014) Zwei Tage Zeit and Babović (2010) Letopis Šapca 1933-1944. The script is less concerned with historians’ interpretations and more with direct witness accounts of the events surrounding the Kladovo transport. I was looking for raw material that could not only provide information about the events, but would also be able to evoke some of the atmosphere of the times and the experiences of the protagonists in my film. Excluding the authoritative voice of the official historical interpretations, I started feeling that I was in a sense undoing the history and the manner in which the story of the Kladovo transport has been told before, in order to tell it in my own way.

After decontextualizing the direct sources from the way they were presented in the literature and the archives, I started assembling them together without commentary or narration in-between. In leaving the raw material to seemingly ‘speak for itself’ I am asserting my wish to enable direct insight into the experiences of the past. The script is however carefully constructed to communicate the history of the Kladovo transport, in the way I understand it and chose to tell it.

2. Filming as embodied research

The camera dwells on the locations, and records the actual (current) state of the places where the Jewish refugees spent their time more than 75 years ago. I am recording the ‘authentic’ locations marked by the presence of the Kladovo transport. Despite significant changes in the landscape over the intervening years, I hope to evoke through the camera lens the ‘bones of the land’ (Tilley 1994) grasping the specificity of the places once inhabited or glanced at by the Jewish refugees. This videographic record is evidence of ‘having been there’, but as Godard (in Ranciere 2006) points out – only ‘after the deed’ (see also Bazin 2005). However, while the long duration of shots and the visual record of the places refer to the attempt to incite a sort of ‘existential authenticity’ (Rickly-Boyd 2013) through film, I am aware that my attempt to truly ‘walk in the footsteps of the past’ is futile and necessarily leads to failure to represent the journey of the Kladovo transport.

Nonetheless, through my own gaze and physical presence in the landscapes once inhabited by the members of the Kladovo transport, as manifested through film, I intervene in and transform ‘the past’. I argue – alongside philosophers of film such as Astruc (1992) and Deleuze (1989, 1997) – that the potential of audio-visual media lies in their ability to essay movement, duration, place, space and materiality. In other words, more than seeking to describe the landscape in which the journey took place, I seek to explore how the physicality of that landscape was interwoven into the travellers’ experience of the journey. This personalized scope of the environment implies embodied experience, not only of the members of the Kladovo transport, but also my own experience, as a researcher visiting and filming the same locations. These two very different positions in time – the one of the refugees at the time and my own in the present – share (albeit very different) visceral engagements with the places and spaces of interest. While I can only make very limited claims of knowing what the (sensorial) experiences of the refugees were, my ‘memory practice’ (Cole 2013) recorded through the camera lens is a mapping exercise that positions our shared experience of the landscape.

3. Editing/working in time.

I started editing the material for Two Emperors and a Queen very early on in the project.

As the process of editing felt like working with externalised time (Doane 2002) and reflecting on the process of doing feels very relevant in a PaR context (Nelson 2013), I considered ways in which I could make time visible in my film. Therefore, I started wondering how to tell the story of the Kladovo transport, while at the same time, allowing the audience to engage with my way of thinking about time. This is, for example, how I decided to edit the entire film in split screen, or to use jump cuts.

The image appears as a long strip across the single screen. The only exception is at the beginning of the film, when photographs appear as three separate images on the screen. Otherwise, the three, at first and later two, screens are joined together in a single frame. This is inspired by my thinking about time and the river, where the image appears as a flow across the screen. In this way, the boundaries between the screens are sometimes lost or barely recognisable. At other times, however, the distinction between the images is very clear and they are perceived as separate screens. Sometimes the same footage is repeated in each of the screens, frequently with a time lapse between them. These variations help to put forward different ideas concerning time, which may appear as a single flow or as a number of fragments.

Outcomes

The film makes the case for interdisciplinary alternative modes of knowing and the value of the creative alongside the critical humanities (Kador and Lukic 2017). To the best of my knowledge, this is the first PaR film project entirely based on a Holocaust narrative, and as such its contribution is important to both fields, that of PaR and that of Holocaust studies.

Dissemination

The film is produced as central part of my doctoral project, and partially funded through a DEAS scholarship awarded by the University of Bristol Department of History. To date, it had several public screenings including at the Wiener Library (London), the Jewish Historical Museum (Belgrade, Serbia), Moesgaard Museum (Aarhus, Denmark), the Serbian embassy London, the University of East London, and the University of Bristol. Throughout the PhD I have showcased my project, including segments from the film, at several UK and international conferences. Among others, I have presented at: NECS conference ‘Archives of/for the Future’ (Lodz, Poland, 2015), ‘World Cinema and the Essay Film’ (Reading, UK, 2015), TAG (Theoretical Archaeology Group) (Cardiff, UK, 2017) and at Media Practice and Education and MeCCSA Practice Network Annual Symposium 2018 ‘CONTEXTS OF FILM PRACTICE’ (Lincoln, UK, 2018) and Visible Evidence XXVI (Los Angeles, USA).

Impact

Beyond its impact in academic circles (see above) the film has great potential to engage with wider audiences and has already done so. For example its recent screening at the Wiener Library was attended by descendants of Holocaust survivors, including relatives of members of the Kladovo transport.

References

Anderl, G. and Manoschek, W. (2001) Gescheiterte Flucht: Der ‘Kladovo-Transport’ auf dem Weg nach Palaestina 1939-1942. Wien: Mandelbaum.

Astruc, A. (1992) Du stylo à la caméra – et de la caméra au stylo écrits 1942-1984. Paris: L’Archipel.

Babović, G. (2010) Letopis Šapca 1933-1944. Beograd: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije.

Bazin, A. (2005) What is Cinema? Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Charlesworth, A. (2004) ‘The Topography of Genocide’ in Stone, Dan (ed.) Historiography of the Holocaust. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cole, T. (2016) Holocaust Landscapes. London: Bloomsbury.

Daniels, J. (2012) Not Reconciled [ONLINE] Available at: http://screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-3/not-reconciled [Accessed 29 Sept 2018].

Daniels, J. (2014) Memory, Place and Subjectivity: Experiments in Independent Documentary Filmmaking [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.jilldanielsfilms.com/publications/ [Accessed 29 Sept 2018].

Deleuze, G. (1997) Cinema 1, The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. (1989) Cinema 2, The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press.

Deleuze, G. (1998) ‘Having an Idea in Cinema (on the cinema of Straub-Huillet)’. In Kaufman, Eleanor and Heller, Kevin John (eds) Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, pp. 14-19.

Doane, M. A. (2002) The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gedalja, N. B. (1958) ‘Dva cara i jedna kraljica’ Jevrejski Almanah 1957-58, Savez Jevrejskih Opština Jugoslavije.

Gigliotti, S. (2009) The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity and Witnessing in the Holocaust. New York: Berghahn Books.

Jones, S. P., Piccini, A. A., Ludivine, A. and Baz, K. (2009) Practice-as-Research in Performance and Screen. London: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.

Jovanović, M. (1979) ‘Wir Packen, Wir Auspacken: Tragična Sudbina Jevrejskih Izbeglica u Šapcu 1941’ in Zbornik 4, Belgrade: Jevrejski Istorijski Muzej.

Kador, T. and Lukic, V. (2017) ‘Šabac: a cinematographic archaeology?’ Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 4.2, pp. 221-228.

Knowles, A., Cole, T. and Giordano, A. (2014) Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lebl, Ž. (1997) ‘Tragedija tansporta Kladovo-Šabac’ [ONLINE] Available at: http://elmundosefarad.wikidot.com/tragedija-transporta-kladovo-sabac [Accessed 29 Sept 2018].

McLaughlin, C. (2018) Prison Memory Archive [ONLINE] Available at http://prisonsmemoryarchive.com/ [Accessed 29 Sept 2018].

Mihajlović, M. and Mitrović, A. (eds) (2006) The Kladovo transport: Roundtable transcript. Belgrade: Jewish Historical Museum.

Nelson, R. (2009) ‘Modes of Practice-as-research knowledge and their place in the academy’. In A. Ludivine, S. Jones, B. Kershaw and A. Piccini (eds) Practice-as-research in Performance and Screen, London: Palgrave.

Nelson, R. (ed.) (2013) Practice-as-Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ranciere, J. (2006) Film Fables, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Reich, H. (2014) Zwei Tage Zeit. Graz: CLIO.

Rickly-Boyd, J. M. (2013) ‘Existential Authenticity: Place Matters’ Tourism Geographies 15, pp. 680-686.

Tilley, C. (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Explorations in Anthropology). Oxford: Berg.

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response to what follows:

Review 1: Invite resubmission with major revisions of practical work and/or written statement.

As the pace of tech innovation continues to accelerate, I am grateful for this essay as a resource of instances of deepfakes, virtual protests, holographic performances, VR games, and all manner of wizardry from Pepper’s Ghost to a cherub escaping a Rubens painting. It’s quite a smorgasbord. And while any viewer could think of another example that might have been included, every one of them would be superfluous, because there’s no way to be exhaustive in the space of half an hour. Jenna does the crucial and praiseworthy work of supplying excellent test cases to sketch the scope of the field. However, I cannot recommend this video essay for publication in its current form for two interconnected reasons: It lacks clarity in its terminology, and that lack of clarity undermines the argument.

Had the subject of the essay been the inadequacy of terms like “virtual” to describe contemporary technological mediation and intervention, this essay might have sounded a very necessary alarm. Throughout, I was struck by how many different shades of meaning the word “virtual” has been forced to carry. It’s straining to the point of bursting due to all the different phenomena we’ve tried to shove inside it. But instead of supplying a new vocabulary for a new era, or even just demonstrating the dangerous slipperiness of existing vocabulary, this essay bases everything on a binarism of actual and virtual, of real and unreal; and despite invoking Baudrillard once, it does not sufficiently clarify what is meant by actual and virtual, and often deploys them contradictorily.

For instance: the essay claims that a virtual influencer named Mikayla “looks, sounds, and moves like a real person,” and that she is “entirely realistic… seeming to be actual people with actual lives.” This essay was my introduction to Mikayla, and I was not taken in by the illusion, though I briefly had been by Shudu Graham, the other virtual model. So, does virtuality represent an aspirational attempt at photorealistic verisimilitude? I would accept that definition if not for the fact that a moment later “virtual” is deployed as an apparent synonym for “cartoonish” in the context of Hatsune Miku. Then, in the final Burj Khalifa example, the essay argues that the unusual elevation constitutes a virtual view of the city. How exactly? Here, no technology of mediation is even in play. Ultimately, I think these concerns could be addressed by un-writing a great deal of the essay. One option would be to use these examples to meditate on how the word “virtual” has come to encompass too much, and why that’s a problem. Another option might be to attempt a new classification and critique its limitations/effectiveness. And there are other options as well.

Whatever you choose, don’t be afraid to say fewer words and draw fewer explicit conclusions. Allow your examples to speak for themselves, and to speak to each other through editing, and allow the viewer a space to consider what “virtuality” is, means, or is-becoming nowadays.

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

Ng and Tomkins’ video essay presents a highly engaging examination of the aesthetic and affective characteristics of the real and virtual boundary, contributing new and original analyses of numerous case study examples from film and media, which holistically provide an incredibly useful genealogy to the phenomenon under question. The video benefits from high production values – made from a wealth of found footage excerpts, the skilfully mixed soundtrack with voice over and music makes the video’s arguments even more engaging and compelling.

Structured by six chapters, the video essay leads the viewer through different facets of ‘the new virtuality’. The introduction presents two examples which sets the scene for the vast spectrum of visual phenomenon under consideration – from holographic illusions created by digital overlays onto the real world (augmented reality) to full blown CGI simulations representing persistent digital worlds (the metaverse). The accompanying research statement builds on extant scholarship which has hitherto examined the real to virtual border in arts, technology, and culture, and provides useful insights into the creative process and a clear rationale for the ordering and structuring of the videos content. The statement also reveals that the video essay is part of an even broader portfolio of work which includes an image-rich companion website making for an excellent teaching resource and a key point of reference which can be expanded and updated. This additional resource proves incredibly useful in providing further detail about the dizzying number of examples from which the video essay draws with some key touchstone examples left un-discussed e.g., the deep fake video of the Queen’s alternative Christmas message of 2020.

It is the video’s fifth chapter, ‘The Virtual Human’ where the key underpinning themes and questions of the video essay are synthesised, and that is to me, the most fascinating. The ‘beings of the new virtuality’ include digital super model Shudu Gram, Lil Miquela – a social media superstar, Japanese virtual performer Hatsune Miku, and the now infamous ‘ABBAtars.’ Ng and Tomkin’s argue that these CGI created individuals showcase their virtuality and their existence signals the beginnings of the widespread acceptance of the virtual performer in contemporary media. This is only set to advance in further moves towards the live experience of virtual performance – where large-scale live audiences will be able to synchronously see and interact with the CGI characters through augmented/mixed reality eye wear. This will lead to new questions requiring further attention and examination. The video essay opens up these questions and more, and will undoubtedly stimulate further enquiry drawing from the impressive wealth of examples and insight that Ng and Tomkins have scrupulously curated.

The video essay not only encourages viewers to question image making and reception in a post-truth era where AI-generated images proliferate – it also successfully captures a significant transitionary moment in media history. The ‘new virtuality’ is a temporally bound moment, situated in a liminal gap, which will soon close, given the rapid evolution of new digital imaging technologies. The video essay will therefore become a very important reference point which has revealed and recorded key insights into this enthralling and complicated temporary space before the joins become invisible, before the line disappears, and before the gap no longer shows.

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response.