Omer Fast

Spielberg’s List
Two-channel video installation, transferred to DVD, 65 min., English/Polish with English subtitles, 2003

For his video Spielberg’s List, made ten years after Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List filled the cinemas, Omer Fast travelled to Krakow, where the film was made and interviewed inhabitants who were extras in Spielberg’s film based on historical events.

In close proximity to the concentration camp of Plaszow, Spielberg had a set constructed, a section of the camp, which was not demolished after film shooting had ended. A few short years later, it is hardly possible to distinguish between the original ruins of the camp and the film set that is slowly falling into disrepair. Today, there are regular so-called “Schindler’s List tours” which show tourist groups around the original locations and the film locations.

Just as the difference between the film sets and the real places is hardly discernible in the landscape, it is hard to separate reality and fiction in Omer Fast’s video work. In two projections Fast mixes his own film material with excerpts from Spielberg’s film – the origin of the film material is often unclear. In the interviews with the film extras, these two levels also show up in a strange way: occasionally, the older people get their memories from the 1940s mixed up with recollections of work on the film. Aided by subtly manipulated subtitles, memories of the media-event mingle with the real historical ones.

All at once one can choose between various meanings, and one realises just how much one generally relies on the media’s images. Yet Omer Fast’s Spielberg’s List is not intended as a critique of Hollywood. By neutralising the differences between the true story and the later reinterpretation of the events, Fast wants to demonstrate how strongly media images shape and overlie our memories, and that films have assumed the function of monuments for collective memory.

Katharina Fichtner


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