By Michael Sandlin.
From Where They Stood shows that documentary filmmaking – used by the Allies during WWII to bring the true scope of Nazi concentration camp horror into the public eye in the first place – can still shed historically relevant light on the Holocaust eighty-some years later.”
Although examining a quieter, more subtle kind of heroism than the sort often depicted in Hollywood-produced based-on-true-events Holocaust films, lauded French nonfiction filmmaker Christophe Cognet has managed to successfully document a previously little-known nonviolent form of prisoner resistance: clandestine photography. These were photos snapped by brave inmates with hidden cameras from inside some of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps of the Second World War: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Ravensbruck. These stealthy prisoners, who somehow managed to get tiny, boxy cameras smuggled in from the outside, risked life and limb to visually document camp conditions. (The film containing these stark images, in some cases, was buried in cannisters on the prison grounds in the hopes they would be dug up by allied liberators after the war.) But as Cognet shows us, behind the taking of these photos was, more broadly, a desperate existential push for human agency in the most inhumane oppressive environs imaginable.
At first we see Cognet and colleagues with enlarged translucent photos of the camp as it was in 1944, manually holding up these images and, in a sense, superimposing these historical stills on the corresponding present-day location to get a sense of the camp’s former grim carceral panorama. There’s also the striking presentation of these clandestine stills in full frame; sometimes the camera will just linger on a particular photo for a few seconds and in other cases will use the Ken Burnsian technique of panning and zooming to give a photo the illusion of cinematic movement.
Of course this being a French production, there is unbridled theorizing on every detail of each photograph examined – we see Cognet and his colleagues poring over each photograph with forensic meticulousness, brainstorming, trying to get inside the minds of their photographic subjects and contextualize these fleeting moments that were captured by the clandestine photographers. Certainly the filmmaker’s zeal to understand the history of each photo leads to plenty of speculative chatter; however, with the help of local experts, occasionally Cognet hits some darkly revelatory pay dirt.
We find that these found photos don’t show atrocities as they happened but equally disturbing “before” and “after” moments of said atrocities. One particular set of photos shows prisoners posing proudly for the camera almost as if participating in a fashion shoot, in what of course is a valiant attempt to restore their own humanity and dignity in the face of an otherwise hellish dehumanizing place. Also featured are photos of so-called “rabbits”: those who were subjected to brutal Nazi scientific and medical experiments in the camp hospital: a few women, in particular, reveal the bodily wounds they suffered while being “treated” by the camp doctors. In one particularly striking scrapbook, we’re privy to one photo that appears to show emaciated prisoners lying outside on the lawn of a crematorium as if sunning themselves in a park. Although superficially the photo has an almost inconceivably leisurely air about it, one German expert studying the scene perceptively digs out its truly disturbing subtext: the prisoners had become so inured to death that, of all things, a crematorium’s grounds could now serve as a site of temporary recreation.
From Where They Stood shows that documentary filmmaking – used by the Allies during WWII to bring the true scope of Nazi concentration camp horror into the public eye in the first place – can still shed historically relevant light on the Holocaust eighty-some years later. And although Cognet’s film doesn’t have the nonfictional epic sweep of, say, Night and Fog or Shoah, it’s visual contribution to Holocaust history is no less invaluable.
Michael Sandlin‘s work has appeared in Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, Film Quarterly, Bookforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the cinema trade publication Video Librarian.
Read also:
http://filmint.nu/tightrope-americans-reaching-for-hope-review-michael-sandlin/