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The Gendered Visuality of Liberation. Ravensbrück and the Holocaust Visual Canon

It is difficult to envision the Holocaust without traces of familiar images coming to mind. In Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), based on Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name, the protagonist, a U.S. Marshal played by Leonardo DiCaprio, experiences several flashbacks of the liberation of Dachau in which he took part as a soldier in 1945. These flashbacks employ highly stylized Holocaust iconography: prisoners wearing striped uniforms, standing with their hands touching the barbed wired fences; carefully staged piles of corpses covered with snow and sheathed in ice; a sign that reads „Arbeit macht frei“, resembling the Auschwitz gate instead of the Dachau one. Shutter Island resorts to this recognizable set of visual imprints to engender an immediate identification of the context depicted and thus shedding light on the constructedness of the visual memory of the Holocaust. By detaching identifiable pictures from their original time-bound context, reshaping them into an aesthetic, oniric, almost hallucinatory form, and placing them in a fictional setting, the film mirrors the process through which the visual memory of this historical event has been constructed by strong identifiable images that, through constant semantic transformations and appropriations, have become secular icons1: abstract and timeless images that condense qualities and ideas beyond their original referentiality.