This article will attempt to explore the connection of documentary films with oral history traditions, primarily in terms of their collective relationships with verbal records of interviews and wills. It will attempt to study the plausibility of using footage from such documentaries – and other filmed documents and wills – as a valid source for developing oral history documents. In doing so, the proposed essay will take the example of a Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985) to illustrate its findings. Furthermore, given the nature of the chosen film, the research will also briefly address the issue of recording and preserving oral stories dealing with traumatic events, which are often preserved and studied in the sense of "collective memory". In its simplest understanding, oral history is an interdisciplinary practice of historical research, in which the researcher engages in interactions with subjects and attempts to obtain historically relevant information, which is made available after an in-depth analysis of the meaning, interpretation and meaning of their narrative; that is, a complete understanding of what is said, how it is said, why it is said and what it means. In this sense, it can be argued that oral history is about both the act of recording and the documentation that is ultimately produced. The famous oral historian Alessandro Portelli distinguishes between "oral history" and "use of oral sources in history" since the former may imply a research method dependent solely on oral sources, which is not typically the case. However, many times academics use the term "oral history" to refer to a historical account that has been developed using a variety of sources, but in which oral sources play the most dominant role, i.e. these accounts do not require exclusive use of oral sources claiming their classification as oral histories. Looking at the trajectory of the development of oral history traditions one sees that the first accounts of history were actually written records of oral narratives and testaments, and it was only with the proposal and spread of the scientific method of research in the early times. 19th century that oral sources were marginalized. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In his book The Voice of the Past, oral historian Paul Thompson elaborates on this prehistory of the modern oral history movement and supplements his claims by picking up examples such as ancient historians' reliance on eyewitness accounts. Furthermore, until the post-war period historians were predominantly interested in the political understanding of history and, due to their restrictive documentation of the power struggle, the lives of ordinary people were blatantly ignored in the larger written narrative. However, in the post-World War II period, scholarly engagement with oral history reignited, so much so that Thompson refers to the oral historians of the era as the "vanguard of a renaissance." The importance of this form lies primarily in facilitating an increasingly holistic understanding of history, which in its social function takes into account the narratives of the common man, in particular the marginalized groups of people whose voices have so far been absent from most historical narratives. wide. , and therefore “history becomes… more democratic”. According to Thompson, all history depends on its social purpose, which can sometimes be obscure - as is often seen in the case of oral history - but can also become extremely palpable, as in the case of written history which provides justifications for socio-political events such as wars,conquests, territorial conquests, revolutions etc., mostly from the point of view of the victor or the socially superior class. Furthermore, Thompson argues that “by introducing new evidence from below, shifting focus and opening up new areas of inquiry, challenging some of the accepted assumptions and judgments of historians, giving recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored” oral history can be rightly regarded as a vehicle for the potential transformation of the content, process and form of the historical discipline in its traditional understanding. The primary means used to access oral sources is through direct interactions in the form of interviews and narrated testimonies. Often auditory recordings are made on site and used by the historian to draw conclusions at a later time. However, it is critical to note that not all interviews lend their findings to oral history traditions. It is only by eliciting and creating knowledge of the past that an interview can claim to engage, even in part, with oral history. Here it becomes important to mention that, unlike the limiting nature of traditional written accounts, oral history, in addition to developing a historical narrative of the past, through its reliance on the memory and remembrance of individuals to develop its narrative, expands its scope. to also incorporate their present. Interviews conducted for the purpose of developing oral histories also have the potential to lead to the discovery of photographs and written documents that may heretofore have escaped the historian's knowledge. Another crucial aspect of the oral history process so far has been that of transcription, in which the historian attempts to faithfully transcribe the words spoken by the interviewee, producing – or rather reproducing – written sources that have long been regarded as forms of evidence more concrete, especially in the traditional understanding of the scientific method. In this light, Portelli argues that written and oral sources do not necessarily exist in isolation from each other, and although the latter are often recognized as mere supports for traditional written sources, the two exemplify some mutual characteristics, as well as some autonomous and specific functions. The very act of transcribing phonetic data for scientific purposes accentuates his claim for their interdependence, although some scholars have gone so far as to imply transcription as a manipulative process in this regard. Based on this, it should be noted that despite being advocates of oral history, most oral historians attempt to adequately address the methodological limitations and drawbacks of the same. Traditional scholars and historians are skeptical of the oral history method and speak of the loss of validity due to the temporal gap between the subjects' experiences and the historian's storytelling/recording process, and also the loss of empirical truth in the rely solely on their memory. The early 1970s saw a wave of opposition from traditionalists, in which they claimed that memory was susceptible to physical deterioration, as well as nostalgia, and that bias seeped into the records as individual accounts often ended up being heavily influenced by the larger collective narrative. . Still others speak of the method's susceptibility to sampling error since most interviews are conducted within a sample group that has been consciously self-selected by the historian. Based on the above, the most frequently cited problems are those of the method's lack of credibility and its apparent relianceexcessive to intersubjective inferences. Over the years, proponents of oral history have attempted to address the limitations of their practice and have developed well-reasoned justifications as well as conclusive answers and means of resolution. First, scholars have argued that, due to the nature of testimonies as human documents rather than merely historical ones, their interactions between past and present take on great significance, as should ideally overcome the concern with complete accuracy. Furthermore, they speak of the written record as similarly selective and partial, especially because early historians were appointed by the same authority figures and took into account only their limited concerns and understandings. Therefore, they object to the invalidation and disregard of verbal reports in their entirety, especially when considered to be only partially inaccurate. In his essay “What Makes Oral History Different,” Portelli argues that the same factors of oral history that traditionalists consider inferior – and about which they are skeptical – can be seen as its strengths, including orality, narrative form, subjectivity. , the "different credibility of memory" and the relationship between interviewer and interviewee. In attempting to establish the validity of oral history, scholars have adopted an interdisciplinary approach that draws on psychology, anthropology, sociology, documentary history, etc. al. Collective learnings from these approaches are applied to assess memory biases and fabulation; develop representative sampling techniques and check for errors; determine the internal and external consistency of your data; and finally understand the influence of interviewers on interviewees' narratives. Furthermore, scholars such as Henry Greenspan have recognized the importance of sustained conversations over time, as this allows the interviewee to repeatedly reconstruct their narrative, allowing for internal checking for coherence, and thus producing a clearer semblance of truth. . In fact, the same question can be formulated differently and asked even within the same interview; these are referred to as internal validity checks. On the other hand, external checks include external confirmation of facts from several independent agencies, including oral and documented sources. Due to their capacity as an audiovisual film medium, documentaries go beyond simply capturing wills in their audio form and also take into account the capture of body language, expressions, movements, etc. – each of which has the potential to integrate subjects. ' testament and oral descriptions based on adherence and the active construction of memory and recollection. One of the main arguments put forward by supporters of oral history concerns its ability to go beyond the segmental features of language, that is, to take into account the meanings that are connoted in the tonal range of speakers, cadences and range of volume, rhythm and speed of speech, pauses and silences etc. Each of these plays a significant role, particularly up to and even during the transcription process. Indeed, scholars such as Lynn Abrams and Richard Bauman also address the performativity of oral history and claim the narratives of interviewees and subjects as “word performances,” which are “… a social activity that cannot take place without a audience." They argue that in their entirety, oral history narrators prescribe a way of speaking separate from ordinary speech – “a speech act performed for an audience, in a particular context”. Therefore, an in-depth interpretation of the communication between interviewer and.