Framing loss and figuring grief in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida

This article concentrates on the formal and aesthetic aspects of Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida in the context of an increasingly visible interest in the history of Polish-Jewish relations in Poland, and with the loss of its Jewish communities in the Holocaust. The film encourages us to pose certain questions: how can something that is no longer present be represented or framed? How can loss be given visual shape, and grief a visible form? In exploring these questions, the article considers how the framing of space becomes intertwined with the process of unearthing, with, that is, the excavation of human remains alongside the extraction of repressed or denied memories and histories. The film’s framing is also warped by grief, which is here understood not only as an individual reaction to loss, but also as inhering in material objects and taking shape in formal structures. Drawing on the writing of Eugenie Brinkema and Roland Barthes, the article explores how grief distresses visibility and illuminates absence.