Synopsis
Harun Farocki resurrects the images shot by Rudolf Breslauer, a photographer, of the Westerbork camp during the Second World War in the Netherlands. This camp was first created by the Dutch authorities to take in Jewish refugees from Germany in 1939 and finally became a “transit camp” in 1942 following the German occupation. These images do not reveal the horror but underline a certain “calm”, a rather convivial organization. Are these images false, because they want to embellish reality, to advocate the productivity of the prisoners at work? In the course of the intertitles, Harun Farocki questions the ambiguity of these images, which can lead to various interpretations.
A word from Tënk
"The debate on the use of archival images goes beyond the mere question of aesthetic judgment: it engages an ethics of the gaze, a definition of the place of the spectator, a conception of the event whose resonances are eminently political." Thus Sylvie Lindeberg and Jean-Louis Comolli summarized the challenge of their seminar entitled The Way of Images.
Here, no colorization, no additional sound. In the deepest silence, Harun Farocki slows down the images, stops them, shows them again and above all intersperses them with text boxes giving the spectator elements of context. Through this "reassembling", he expresses precisely what these images shot for Nazi propaganda, in this antechamber of deportation, do not say. He gives us to see and thus allows the necessary distance to think.
Éva Tourrent
Filmmaker and Tënk France's Artistic Director
