Imaginative resistance and documentary cinema: the case of Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust (2013)

If trust and belief are at the root of the documentary experience, what happens if a documentary encourages the spectator to adopt a point of view that is unethical – at least according to the viewer? What if the director violates the viewer’s moral autonomy? Taking her own experience of spectatorial resistance watching Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust as a case in point, Nathalie Rachlin explores the limits of the documentary pact and uses the concept of “imaginative resistance” developed by analytic philosophers to further investigate and theorize the role moral agency plays in spectatorship.