Output details

The Cemetery

The Cemetery employs a methodology that I have referred to at conferences as ‘snapshot ethnography’, drawing upon principles of visual anthropology and focusing for a condensed period on a localized area. The locus of the film is Prague’s Jewish quarter, where the work examines tourist interactions with key historic sites such as the Old Jewish Cemetery. The film also engages with the presence and absence of Franz Kafka, a Jewish figure who is central to Prague’s tourism industry. It does so through a series of visual and aural metaphors and excerpts from his writings. Prior to filming, for background research I conducted interviews with members of Prague’s secular and religious Jewish community, including Holocaust survivors, and undertook research at the Jewish Museum of Prague, local synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and the concentration camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt). A research outcome of the film is the visual framework it affords scholars as a means to view the connective and tissue of unusual and contrasting scenes during a Purim service at the Altneu synagogue, where Kafka had his bar mitzvah, of rabbis dressed as the green hornet and Father Christmas, while outside tourists visit the Easter market. The film also illustrates the sharp differentiation between thousands of tourists streaming through the Old Cemetery, and the sense of absence in the New Cemetery, where Kafka’s sisters have an informal plaque -- a signifier as victims of the Holocaust of their missing corpses. The Cemetery was selected for screening at the largest annual international documentary conference in 2013, Visible Evidence held in Stockholm, where the film’s methodology was the subject of discussion by leading theorists, Bill Nichols (Representing Reality, 1992), Michael Renov (The Subject of Documentary, 2004) and Catherine Russell (Experimental Ethnography, 1999), chaired by the conference director.