Holofiction

Description

The film's material spans 1938 to the present and is drawn from fictional films and television series that depict the Holocaust. It places the question of representation on the screen itself by assembling moments originally produced across almost nine decades. The location of "action" is therefore cinematic: sound stages, studio sets, broadcast footage and film prints as they existed in their original productions. Holofiction is a documentary released in 2026 that constructs its subject through montage. The work pieces together thousands of excerpts taken from narrative fiction — feature films, television dramas and miniseries — to trace how visual language about the Holocaust was created and reused. The approach is archival and synthetic: discrete shots and short sequences are re-edited into new sequences that foreground similarities and repetitions. The film draws from an archive of more than 3,000 narrative works. From that corpus it selects and reconfigures several thousand short clips; those pieces range from single frames and reaction shots to longer diegetic sequences. Each excerpt remains identifiable as a filmed text, but in this new context it is used as evidence: sample points in a larger survey of cinematic practice. Editing is the primary method of inquiry. Clips are juxtaposed to reveal recurring camera positions, repeated staging choices, and parallel prop or costume imagery that recur across productions and eras. Cuts sometimes align similar compositions from different decades; at other times they stack disparate moments to produce visual clusters. There is no voiceover narrative that recounts events; the film's commentary is enacted through pattern, repetition and contrast. The documentary repeatedly foregrounds the process of codification — how certain images and framings have become conventional when filmmakers represent the Holocaust. By presenting excerpts back-to-back, the film treats each borrowed image as an instance of a practice that can be mapped and counted. The project is explicit about scope: fiction and television, 1938 to the present, over 3,000 sources, and thousands of excerpted moments reassembled for critical scrutiny. In the middle of the film the montage consolidates into extended comparative sequences. These sections group clips by visual traits and historical moment, running sequences that show the same compositional choices reproduced on screen over time. The middle functions as a concentrated field of examples: repeated tableaux, recurrent camera framings and recurring narrative snippets arrayed so their similarities are plainly visible, and the analytical pattern the film proposes is displayed without resolving it.