'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

the train wheels moving rapidly over the tracks. At the very end of Lene‟s retelling, a
close-up shot focuses on Lene‟s face, hand, and wedding ring. Lene coughs and covers
her hand with her mouth so that her golden ring is shown in the center of the frame.
Next, she leans over to Anna and kisses her daughter lovingly on the forehead.
In the fairy tale, the ring becomes proof of a suppressed macabre reality, the
robber‟s brutal slaying of the murdered bride and untold numbers of other young women.
If we understand the ring as a symbol of a dark suppressed history in the fairy tale, then it
is significant that two conspicuous images of Lene‟s golden wedding band are shown at
the end of the fairy tale sequence in which the Holocaust is evoked. From my
perspective, Sanders-Brahms juxtaposes visual images of Lene‟s golden wedding band
with the tale‟s symbol of the gold ring (and severed finger) as evidence of a horrendous
crime in order to indicate that in her film the whole fairy tale segment acts as a narrative
locus for the repressed history of the Holocaust. Sanders-Brahms does not remain silent
about the Holocaust but instead evokes it in an indirect way through the synergistic use of
visual images and plot details of the tale. She uses the image of the ring immediately
after her evocation of the Holocaust to indicate to the viewer that she has not forgotten to
represent the Holocaust, but instead has chosen to depict it as repressed history. In my
opinion, Sanders-Brahms‟ representation of the Holocaust as a buried and unspoken
history is particularly effective and historically apt if one considers the tendency in post-
war German society to repress and conceal the painful and guilt-producing memory of
the Nazi genocide of German Jews and other victims.
The motif of „producing the finger and ring‟ or of supplying physical evidence
can not only be applied to Sanders-Brahms‟ use of the documentary footage and
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