'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

connection with the politics of the “Third Reich.” An extreme close-up of the flag shows
it covered in a swarm of black flies, which suggests the infestation of Germany by
Nazism. 65 The flag cannot be contained within the frame of the camera, suggesting that
the effects of National Socialism extend well beyond the borders of the war generation‟s
life into the existence of Sanders-Brahms‟ generation (Kosta 139).
Moreover, during my interview with Sanders-Brahms, she stated that “…the first
image of the film is a reflection, it is the reflection of a swastika in the dark water. So in
a way, this is a means of a film image showing that this [film] is a reflection in the double
sense of the word” (Reed 141). She goes on to say that, “[t]he reflection is a reflection of
a memory. It‟s not just the memory itself, [… but] it is a reflected memory, that is to say,
the memory is shown to make you think about it, to analyze it” (142). Hence, through the
film image of the Nazi flag reflected in the lake, Sanders-Brahms indicates that the
greater part of her film is based on a refracted or indirect memory of mother‟s war and
post-war experiences. Sanders-Brahms, the filmmaker, would not have directly
experienced the events in the film that happened before her birth nor would she have
remembered what happened during her very early childhood. Rather, she would have
created postmemories of these events through an imaginative investment in the stories
passed on to her by her mother. Thus, her film is a personal reflection on a postmemory
of her mother‟s experience and she hopes that it might trigger analysis and reflection in
the viewer.
65 In an interview with Peter Brunette in 1990, Sanders-Brahms states that she intentionally used the image
of the flies crawling over the flag to establish the historical and political context of her film. Moreover, she
explains that the image was serendipitous, stating: “An image like that can‟t be planned. When we shot
that scene it was a hot summer night and all the flies were sitting on the flag, and I asked them to shoot it
that way. I felt it was a wonderful image of the historical and political situation. It reflects so much. It
would have been very difficult to construct it, you know, to have 2,000 flies at the same time, making
honey on the flag. I‟d like to take credit for it, but it was just given to me” (Brunette 41).
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