Conflictions of objectivity and oppressive authority in the typological and topographical forms related to collection and mapping within film. a reflection on Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin’s The View from Our House

The View from Our House (76mins, UK, 2013) interprets a memory of a young Jewish would-be photographer in Nazi-era Berlin – of hearing screaming coming from a building close to her house. This was an SA prison where people were tortured and murdered. The film builds out from this single memory, and site of memory, in an attempt to reclaim in the surfaces of the present, a personal sense of history. It is largely formed from collections of images (of the architecture of the prison building, sites of slave labour and the layout of a housing estate) – collections triggered by recounted memory, details gleaned from diaries and the filmmakers’ own direct experience of place. These collections echo the mundane process of shooting, shifting from one identified location to the next, creating and collecting one shot after another. The lengthy duration of these collections emphasises the act of collection.

This paper reflects, in relation to other works, on the film’s use of collection in relation to notions of typology and topographical mapping. In particular, the filmmaker’s own methodology is considered in relation to authoritarian modes of collection – the fascistic imperative to order, classify and murderously control. The paper will reflect on the film’s problematic balance between the distance of objectivity achieved through collection, and the oppression of cataloguing and categorising – the film also draws on archive collections instigated by the Nazi regime in the persecution of its citizens (Erika, the subject of the film, was denied a place to study photography in Berlin because of her classification as a particular type of person: Jewish). Does the structured typological and topographical form of the film succeed in inviting reflection on such fascistic notions of authority and prejudice, and does it question the status of the image as definitive record or document?