Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

My title comes from a French review of Emil Weiss’s 1989 documentary Falkenau, Vision de l’Impossible in which maverick filmmaker Sam Fuller narrates his involvement as a combat infantryman with the 1st infantry division (aka “The Big Red One”), focusing in particular on his participation at the liberation of the death camp at Falkenau. The “apocalypse” in question is the one Fuller witnessed in the camp, later fictionalized in his war epic The Big Red One (1980). However, the French reviewer refers not directly to those events but to the reel of film Fuller shot in the camp, documenting an interment ceremony in which the leading citizens of Falkenau prepare the bodies of the camp’s victims for decent burial, footage shot under orders from his battalion commander Capt. Richmond. This then is the “impossible vision” referenced in the title of Weiss’ documentary, a ritual recorded for posterity with the hand-cranked camera that Fuller had received as a gift from his mother back in the States, footage subsequently entitled V-E+1, and inducted into the National Film Registry in 2014. I argue that it is this “spectacle,” not the spectacle of the film per se but the one observed, unmediated, by the filmmaker, that provides the key to Fuller’s post-war films, irrespective of genre. With close reference to a select number of Fuller’s movies, I discuss how the “apocalypse” he witnessed shaped his attitude to war, race, ethno-nationalist ideologies, and totalitarian regimes.