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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
authorities, but it also helped to provide the setting for and portray a life
that no longer exists.
Historians Robert Rosenstone (2006) and Alun Munslow (2007) have
argued that film production as a way of writing history has to be taken more
seriously than it previously has been. They mean that film can “create experiential
and emotional complexities way beyond the printed page”
(Munslow 2007:522). Historian Vanessa R. Schwartz emphasises the
importance of imagination when we try to understand the past, something
which has, she suggests, been aided by the use of film (Schwartz 2013:10–
11). She also suggests that although we are well aware of the way politics
affect “the methods, questions and problems of the historian and produce a
certain optic on the past, there has been almost no consideration of the
influences of mass culture and its media such as film on historians, historicity
and the development of historical representation over the course of the
cinematic century” (Schwartz 2013:2). When dealing with remains in
periods closer to our own time this also has to be addressed in archaeology.
Just as Schwartz means historians need to adjust and add to their methods
in order to “making sense of the profusion of images that are so essential to
the record of modern life” (Schwartz 2013:5) so do archaeologists working
with modern material in order to understand how this affect the past that
we study. Historian Alejandro Baer has, for example, discussed how the past
is represented through commercial audiovisual media using the example of
the Holocaust. He suggests that in the history of the Holocaust traditional
boundaries between imagined and factual history has become blurred and
that, in particular the film Schindler’s List has “created new spaces within
which it has become possible to associate oneself to the past” (Baer 2001:
495) He even suggests, using studies of historian Loshitzky, that the film has
demonstrated that it is possible that “culture industry is capable of
preserving (or reintroducing) the events of the Holocaust in the collective
memory and historical consciousness of globalized audiences” (Baer
2001:494).
Archaeologist Cornelius Holtorf has discussed the importance of a so
called ‘experience economy’ in which it is the experience of something itself
that is becoming increasingly important. He means the importance lies in
“engaging people sensually, cognitively, socially, culturally and emotionally”
(Holtorf 2007:6). The medium of film can therefore also be seen as an
important part of this experience economy which helps people experience
the past in a more cognitive way. How these films are constructed and the
images they produce of an historical event, of an object or an era are then
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