On The Limit of Testimonial: Camp Cinema in The Context of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ Concept – Son of Saul

Authors : Semra Kotan, Yavuz Kotan

Pages : 56-72

Doi:10.31122/sinefilozofi.1742461

View : 110 | Download : 438

Publication Date : 2025-10-30

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :The camp is one of the invisible but decisive structures of the modern political order. According to Giorgio Agamben, the camp is not a place of exception where law is suspended; it is the primary space of modernity. Those living in this space are bodies deprived of legal identity and political subjectivity, reduced to mere “bare life”. This study aims to discuss how the human state of being is represented in camp cinema, based on Agamben’s concepts of “bare life” and “homo sacer”. László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015) cinematically questions both the possibility of an ethical resistance and the limits of testimony through the desire of Saul, a member of the Sonderkommando serving in the Auschwitz camp, to bury a child he believes to be his own son. In this study, the narrative structure of the film, the use of subjective camera, the limitation of the visual field and the sound-image relationship are examined through the descriptive analysis method; in this way, it is revealed how the figure of “bare life” is constructed on the cinematic plane. As a result of the analysis, it was concluded that the film, rather than directly representing a traumatic reality, conducts an ethical questioning regarding the possibility of witnessing; and conveys the bare life buried in silence to the audience through the conscious elision of visual narration.
Keywords : Kamp Sineması, Çıplak Hayat, Homo Sacer, Son of Saul, Auschwitz

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