When we remember or we dream, our minds create motion pictures of our memories and our dreams. Who knew, when photography including moving pictures, was invented in the 1890s that we would eventually come to see ourselves as subjects of photography and would confuse “real life” with the movies we see, created for us by others.
That is why Holofiction, the documentary depicting the real history of the Shoah through the fictional films made about it is so important today. All handmade by the master craftsman Michal Kosakowski, perhaps one of the last non-AI films to be made.
Today we live ‘as if’ we were in a motion picture. We are increasingly under surveillance and are increasingly depicting our lives on social media, ‘as if’ our lives were made for the movies. Forget our 15 minutes of fame, as Andy Warhol predicted…now we can be on camera 24/ 7.
Isn’t that what film is about nowadays? Watching the lives of others and empathetically incorporating their experiences into our own interpretations of life?
To teach literacy today, we need to teach critical thinking using moving pictures and in fact, creating our own moving pictures of our own lives. Reading skills will result from the need to create a script, mathematics from the science of cinematic ratios - horizontal or vertical, etc. - and critically asking and answering why we tell our stories as we do.
Like Walter Benjamin, I want to immunize myself from the present by remembering the past, a past which in its origin contained and brought to us all possibilities and potentials.
On Photography Then and Now: Walter Benjamin and Michal Kosakowski’s film Holofiction
As magical as photography was in its early days, so today reality has been magically replaced by the camera, an artificial eye. We are as moving pictures ourselves. We are dissociated. We are increasingly on camera and we are acting as if our lives were made for media exposure.
Furthermore AI aka fake reality is replacing authentic reality with its made-up imagery that supersedes documentary truth. Today we experience reality is as if we were being photographed and we are losing touch with what is real and what is fake. Everything is “just like in the movies”.
Walter Benjamin’s A Short History Of Photography is a very short and relevant essay he wrote in 1931 about the art of photography – both still and moving. “The fog that veils the dawn of photography is not quite as thick as that which obscures the dawn of printing.”
The dawn of printing, of photography and today, of digitization are three challenges which have changed civilization and culture radically.
The invention of printing and the democratization of the printed word allowed for an expansion of what we mentally took in from mere observation of natural events and oral storytelling. Photography revealed visions we could not take in with the naked eye. Today, digitization has blurred our mental perception of reality, obscured as it is by disinformation and AI photography. Reality itself seems unreal and is as difficult for people to understand as magic is.
Walter Benjamin’s aphorism about every document of culture also being a document of barbarism is as true today as the culture wars take place and culture is being usurped to be rewritten by morons and barbarians as it was in his time.
When the culture of moving pictures began, even Freud was aware and made note that when we remember and when we dream, the materialization and recording of the dreams and memories are as if they were playing out on a screen like a movie. He asked how it was possible that of all the days and hours we have lived, we recall only a few that play out in our minds like moving pictures.
Benjamin’s discourse on photography juxtaposed with my own thoughts on how reality is perceived in our puny human brains today brings me to conclude that our perceptions of reality today are being shaped by instantaneous and unremitting digital transmission of information. We are uncertain about where reality resides, in made up conspiracy theories, AI altered photography, what we see posted on Facebook and various media…We have forgotten, if we ever knew, that only within ourselves can we find reality and even then, it is complicated.
Early photography in which technology and magic were not quite separated became accepted as a way to record personal realities. Storytelling as movies gave us ideas of how we might live. A good story well told in a movie was a fiction we lived vicariously.
Now with digitization, our perceptions have been reversed drastically because we no longer know where the separation between our perceptions and our actual existence is to be found. Were twin towers really destroyed? Yes, but by whom? Did the Holocaust really happen? That is more a matter of speculation today than it was when it actually did happen, as history, like memory becomes a story told on screen, just like in the movies.
Benjamin states that, “The flowering of photography --the works of Hilliard, Cameron, of Hugo, of Nadar -- blossomed in its first decade… The most precise technique can lend a magical quality to its creation that a painted picture can never possess. The observer still feels an irresistible compulsion to look for the tiny spark of happenstance, of the here and now in such a picture.
A 1912 description of the daguerreotype[1] says ‘people did not dare to look too long at the first pictures... They shied away from the clarity of the sitters and believed that the tiny little faces of the people in the picture could see them, so astonishing was the effect on people of the uncommon of clarity and the uncommon natural fidelity of the first daguerreotype pictures.’[2] These first reproduced people entered the visual field of photography unblemished or, better put, uncaptioned… few people had yet seen their names in print…The contact between reality and the photograph had not yet taken place.”
Benjamin’s statement that “the difference between technology and magic is a thoroughly intellectual variable” was later paraphrased by Arthur C. Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.[3]
What does Walter Benjamin have to do with Holofiction?
Benjamin’s look at the earliest days of photography is a precursor to the view expressed by Uli AIgner in her preface to one of her husband Michael Kosakowski’s most notable works, the 25-minute film Just Like In The Movies (2006), an experimental documentary that compiles movie scenes foreshadowing the 9/11 attacks, aiming to show the power of cinema to visualize apocalyptic images long before they become reality.
She says, “Almost all of us saw the events of September 11, 2001 on television. We knew these images from our cinematic experiences and thus found it almost impossible to recognize them as events that actually occurred, and even more difficult to accept them a such in the moment we witnessed them.”
Much like I feel today watching tRump dismantle our 250 year old democracy and the perception of immigrants, stripped of any rights and placed in the detention center of El Salvadore, like in a horror movie.
She goes on to state “The defenselessnesss we experienced when we stared at the live broadcast was similar to that felt by the first moviegoers who, with the Lumière brothers’ film, found themselves exposed to a train that seemed to rush directly at them at full speed. Now, however, it is today. 2006……the borders between political reality and media-generated fiction are wide open--one way or another.”
Michal Kosakowski’s own statement of the world’s viewing of the World Trade Center’s collapse.
I want to posit the thesis that our “perception apparatus” today, in 2026 has become so formed by photography, movies, acting, being stars, being famous, that reality itself has become just like in the movies. Obama tried to warn us, It is not like in the movies it is real, Take heed. But few took heed because we have become so accustomed to acting as if we were on camera—and we are increasingly under surveillance—it has become a normal state that so much of what we do is a performance for a camera, for fans, for likes and clicks more than it is for our own selves. We censor ourselves and edit our acts and act as if we were creating a [false] movie picture of the life we live.
Walter Benjamin poses philosophical questions around the rise and fall of photography that for decades had gone undiscussed. We all grapple increasingly with determining what is real. The internet bombards us with messages of indeterminate provenance. Is that cute tiger cub real or A.I.-generated?[4]
How reality is formed in human minds…little people see you in the early daguerretypes; how reality is formed by seeing ourselves as the photographed, the actor in a movie; magic, science and technology become one and the same.
We will soon see AI and our computers as coming from God. But the God is Baal, the Golden Calf. Hi tech is not magic and God is not its determinator. Tech is tech, mechanics. Magic is a phenom that we like to imagine is real.
The contact between reality and the photograph had not yet taken place in its first decade and the contact between reality and the digital domain has not yet taken place today.
With Paolo Marzocchi’s exceptional score and without narration, director Michal Kosakowski presents a hypnotic amalgamation of images, including record players, burning books, radios, and people saying goodbye for the last time. Drawing from an archive of narrative works, the film scrutinizes how Holocaust imagery has been codified in cinema and forces us to examine how we participate in its consumption.
When Michal K. shows us the Holocaust as it is depicted in fiction films, we begin to grasp the disparity between reality and fiction and the confusion confounds us. Did it happen like that or did it happen differently? Did it even happen? When we watch ICE round up people, do we grasp the totalitarian reality or are we only watching as if it were happening?
[1] Karl Dauthendey’s father said this.
[2] Article quoted in Max Dauthendey, Der Geist mieines Vaters: Aufzeichnungen aus einem begrabenen Jahrhundert (My Father’s Ghost: Notes from a Buried Century), Albert Langen, Munich 1921 p.72.
[3] in Arthur Clark’s 1962 essay, “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”, which was later included in his collection of essays titled “Profiles of the Future”. This essay contains his Three Laws, notes the Big Think.
[4] See NY Times article below: