Keywords:
Orson Welles, found footage, performative images, images of atrocities, mediation, political engagementCopyright (c) 2025 Sibley Anne Labandeira Moran

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
This paper centers on Orson Welles’s film The Stranger (1946) and its use of footage of concentration camps shot by allied troops in 1945. The scene where it is included lasts only a few minutes, but the implications are far-reaching in relation to both issues of historical representation and broader debates on the use of visual records as documents, as evidence and as emotional triggers. The use of these images is also a performative one, in the sense that they determine the action of characters within the narrative, on the one hand, and that they are meant to interpellate the audience, on the other.
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