The Truth (?) of Wartime Rape: Memory, Form, and Meaning in Helke Sander’s Liberators Take Liberties and Wojciech Tochman’s Today We’re Going to Draw Death

Abstract

This article analyzes the representational strategies used to show, narrate, and contextualize sexual violence during past military conflicts in Helke Sander’s 1992 documentary film BeFreier und BeFreite ( Liberators Take Liberties) and Wojciech Tochman’s 2010 reportage Dzisiaj narysujemy śmierć ( Today We’re Going to Draw Death). My comparative analysis of the formal strategies used by Sander and Tochman to effectively diminish various modes of “historical distance” serves to promote a discussion on the potential of each medium to evoke empathetic understanding of the trauma of wartime rape victims in the present.