The persistence of the void: formal absence in Holocaust representation from Langfus to Ida

This article argues against the assumption that formal absence—narrative gaps in prose, withheld images, and acoustic restraint in film—is inherently ethical in Holocaust representation. Silence, withholding, and restraint do not possess ethical value in themselves; their force depends on historically specific conditions of authority, referential discipline, mediation, and reception. A silence that blocks spectacle and interpretive mastery in one context may, in another, risk aestheticization, political evasion, or appropriation. Bringing together Anna Langfus's Les Bagages de sable [1962; The Lost Shore] and Le Sel et le soufre [1960; The Whole Land Brimstone] with Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), László Nemes's Son of Saul (2015), and Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida (2013), the paper reads “silence” across media not as a shared language of testimony but as a set of medium-specific practices for registering violence without converting it into spectacle or interpretive mastery. The article does not treat these works as parallel case studies. It uses them asymmetrically to trace a genealogy of mediation: Langfus marks survivor-era proximity, when fictional form registers the instability of postwar testimonial address; Shoah codifies refusal as a methodological and ethical doctrine; Son of Saul functions as a transitional bridge, showing how that doctrine is inherited within postmemory cinema and festival cultures of seriousness; and Ida becomes the limit case in which formal absence enters a contested national public sphere and becomes available for competing political uses and explicit institutional intervention.