An innocent, idyllic walk in the park, couples and families wandering about. A static camera creates the impression of life going by. Increasingly, a cabinet of 21st century curiosities comes into view: dogs in strollers, fanny packs, a Jurassic Park T-shirt; and an occasional kippa.
This might as well be a pop culture amusement park, like the T-shirt suggests. But Germany-based Ukrainian documentary director Sergei Loznitsa takes us into the former Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen. The first word we can make out is "1945", followed by a shot of the infamous Auschwitz gate that reads
Arbeit macht frei, work sets you free.
The scene is set.
This is not new territory. In 2007 Robert Thalheim released the haunting feature film AND ALONG COME TOURISTS about a young German volunteer in Auschwitz and his encounters with survivors, tourists, and locals alike.
Frauke Finsterwalder's 2013 film FINSTERWORLD took a crueller, punch-in-the-stomach approach, taking disrespectful behaviour at Holocaust sites to a very uncomfortable extreme.
In this quiet documentary that smartly builds in layers and circles over an hour and a half, Loznitsa indirectly follows some of the "Holocaust tourists" (if you pay attention, you will see some again and again) with very long shots from fixed camera angles,
accumulating an archive of commemorative failure. The obvious
framing shots through doors and windows --looking in not out-- make for an intriguing perspective at first but feel a bit too deliberate and artful after a while, even as voyeuristic as the tourists. I feel reminded of the masterful but manipulative school of Werner Herzog, detached but also arrogant, setting traps for people to walk into.
I cannot help but wonder what a filmmaker like Harun Farocki would have made of this material.
The mostly ambient sound includes loud planes overhead or the wind in the trees, interrupted by the multilingual cacophony of the tour guides through which Loznitsa amplifies questions about where the toilets are. Many visitors are holding audio guides to their ears. Some of the live tour guides make valiant attempts at trying to make history come to live through story-telling, referencing events that have also been made into films, such the 13 minutes by which Georg Elser missed Hitler in his assassination attempt (see last year's 13 MINUTES) and the tragic role of the
Sonderkommandos that last year's Cannes winner SON OF SAUL depicted.
Loznitsa's preoccupation beyond the mere sea of people washing over the camps is the constant media permeation of what we see (or don't actually see). It is at first not prominent.
En masse, the selfie sticks and phones and cameras drape a mediated fog over the camps. We recognize them as knee-jerk snapshots that will never be revisited but lost in the depth of the Cloud, with only a few proud SLR camera owners attempting something resembling what used to be photography. If you cannot grasp it, perhaps your iPad can? At least, with this many images, there isn't any room left for denial. Loznitsa does not have to look for his protagonists and his meta theme. Some are uncomfortable in the face of the lurking camera, a number shoot back, instinctively adding another medial layer. "
Life was more relaxed when apple and blackberry were just fruits," a young girl's T-shirt reads. And simpler.
But despite the carefully curated images, does it get us anywhere to exhibit people not understanding the meaning and scope of the traces of past atrocities they are seeing? Do we know what revelation even one might take away from this visit? Some are laughing and eating, some are lost in thought and holding their partner's arm. Some indisputably disrespectful and disinterested when shooting each other in execution poses. Alas, they are not prisoners but tourists, who luckily are allowed to eat or go to the bathroom. The last group we see leave Auschwitz has T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan Travel for Peace and the more depictive German name "active peace travellers". After watching the film, I feel lucky and privileged and comforted to have a happy ringtone on my cell.
I would argue that Peter Eisenman's 2005 Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, well-conceptionalized on paper, is in the real world an example of unsuccessful commemoration, for it being turned into a playground by visiting students daily, the intended experience of increasingly encroaching concrete slabs as you walk towards the last chamber largely lost in the bustle of Berlin. But what is the alternative for
actual historic sites of attempted genocide like concentration camps? Close them to the ignorant masses? Enforce character checks before admittance? Wait for the arrival of the New Man? Or just do the hard, frustrating work of trying to explain, educate, remember.
Loznitsa captures amazing images. I am mostly left disappointed by what he does with them, other than in the four or five outstanding tableaus that go deeper. With his black-and-white arthouse observation, he puts himself too much outside and above the people he watches, outside the human race. Not surprisingly, the reaction of the Toronto audience after the film was indignant moral superiority and consternation, a fairly easy, quickly evaporating stance.
It feels like old-school European documentary filmmaking that has the answer before even opening up the question. I haven't learnt anything new, not about Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, not about the pervasive contemporary proliferation of media use, not about mass tourism or commemoration, not about humanity:
As I walk into the cinema to watch AUSTERLITZ, the woman sitting next to me takes off her shoes, puts her feet over the seat in front of her and is cozily lounging across the row. As I walk out of the cinema, the first message that pops up on my Twitter feed reads: "Man took selfies with sex doll at 9/11 memorial stag party."
My take-away from that day: Life goes on, there are cell phones after Auschwitz, history fades, people are good and bad, stupid and thoughtful. Let's deal with it. By remembering and educating, not belittling.
by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
image: AUSTERLITZ, courtesy TIFF
