Austerlitz

The best documentaries have two characteristics:  first, they reveal their subjects in an unexpected and surprising light, and, second, they challenge the viewer to form his or her own opinions about the material presented.  A documentary that tells me only what I already know (or think I know) about its topic fails -- if the movie only shows what I could have surmised on my own, then, the film is superfluous.  Similarly, if a documentary is designed to persuade me to a particular point of view and guides me so brutally that I have no recourse but to accept the film's premises and conclusions, then, the movie is a species of propaganda.  As Leni Riefenstahl and Roger Moore have shown us, propaganda can be art -- but it is a debased form of art, more closely related to advertising than anything else.  By these criterion, Sergei Loznitsa's 90 minute documentary Austerlitz is a stunning success.  Unfortunately, the movie's praxis is so rigorous and austerely scientific that the film will have most audiences running for the exits.  This fact, alone, is thought-provoking and deserves careful consideration.

Loznitsa's film consists of approximately 40 shots -- I counted them and reached a total of 32 separate camera placements with the four final shots utilizing a single set-up and, thereby, creating a montage of rather inconspicuous jump-cuts. (I count forty images, because I probably missed several).  The film is shot in austere, but beautiful black and white.  In some instances, the camera uses very deep focus to flatten the image, creating a frieze-like effect -- people moving toward the camera seem not to advance, but rather walk in place.  Some camera set-ups exploit multiple planes of focus -- people in the foreground are blurred while those in the deep and middle distance are in tight focus.  Several striking shots use windows as mirrors - we see people both inside and exterior to buildings; the people inside the building look out through glass on which we see reflected the crowds outside.  In one startling shot, people approaching from the right are first glimpsed in the pane of a half-open door where they seem to be somehow magnified.  Loznitsa's camera placements involving panes of translucent glass sometimes look like similar effects achieved in Tarkovsky films.  In several shots, objects in the background seem to loom close to the people inspecting them -- for instance, one image of two ominous side-by-side ovens is framed by the telephoto lens to make the crematorium seem very close, indeed, looming over the spectators.  Each shot lasts from 90 seconds to three minutes.  The camera does not move.  Only in the last 30 seconds of the film does anyone explicitly acknowledge the presence of the camera recording the crowds of people touring the historical site -- at the very end of the movie, a girl casually waves to Loznitsa''s camera.  The film's sound-recording is similarly complex -- we hear natural sounds (birds, the wind in trees, something that sounds like the hardware on a flag clicking against a flag pole); after about 20 minutes, the sound is recorded so that we can hear what people are saying -- it is a Babel of voices, often with several layers one atop the other:  in one sequence, subtitles tell us what a Spanish tour guide is saying while we hear an English or Australian tour guide speaking simultaneously.  We are naturally drawn to listen to the English commentary while trying to read the subtitles that are about something completely different -- this is disorienting and difficult for the viewer to do. The crowds shown in the images ebb and flow -- sometimes, we see dozens of people crowded together in the frame.  But these crowds also disperse and there are privileged moments when we see one or two people alone in the frame -- everyone else has wondered off.  The alternating congestion in the images and their kenosis or emptying out gives the film an odd rhythm. 

The subject of the film is Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, or more accurately, the tourists visiting the camp.  The film was made on a very hot day in the summer and the light seems to be blinding.  Many of the visitors wear scanty shorts and tee-shirts, often bearing disorienting slogans in English.  The big parade-grounds are blinding and people walk under parasols to keep the sun off their heads.  A lot of the tourists carry bottles of water and drink occasionally.  About half of them have audio guides that they hold to their ears.  Some take photographs with their cameras or selflie-sticks.  (In one scene, an attractive woman poses with her arms casually stretched to both sides directly in front of the gaping black sockets of the crematorium ovens.)  The film begins with a shot of trees moving in the breeze and, behind them, tired tourists sitting on a bench.  Then, there are several shots of the gateway to the camp both from within the fence and outside -- in handsome Bauhaus letters, the gate displays the motto Arbeit macht frei.  The next 30 shots take place at various locations in the camp.  This sequence ends with a long shot, empty of people, of the ovens.  The final four shots are jump-cuts showing the crowds of people exiting the camp, most of them smiling and looking happy.  The last shot shows a large group of people wearing white tee-shirts that read "Travel for Peace" with an image of the globe and a dove.  A girl associated with this group waves merrily to the camera.  (Several people inside the camp seem to have observed the camera but appear to be intimidated by it -- they look and we see concern registered in their eyes but  they don't gesture at Loznitza's photographer.)  Often we see people looking with grave concern at something off-camera, presumably a plaque or some kind of photographic exhibit.  The film is not about what the tourists see and so we are never shown the historical exhibits or written plaques in the camp.  The objective of the film is to show us the tourists, not the camp and, so, with few exceptions, we can't figure out exactly where the visitors are located or what exactly they are seeing.  An exception is near the ovens where so-called Sonderkommando extracted the dead from the gas chambers and fed them into the crematoria.  There is a huge grim statute in that area, a kind of all-male Pieta of emaciated prisoners carrying a dead man on a spread cloth -- it looks something like certain Baroque and renaissance images of Christ's deposition from the cross.  Most of the tourists wear white because of the heat and we see them rendered by the telephoto lens appearing like blithe drifting clouds in front of the huge, grotesque statues -- this shot has a very great formal beauty. 

So what are we to make of this film.  Loznitza provides no voice-over and no overt commentary.  The deck is loaded against the poor tourists:  it's a hot day and to say that they are casually dressed is an understatement and, of course, they guzzle water and, sometimes, even surreptitiously eat food that they have smuggled into the site.  The camp seems huge and it's pretty clear that many of these people are tired, probably a bit numb from walking long distances.  The film would have a very different look if it were shot in bad weather with the tourists wearing coats and parkas or if it were snowing.  The tourists generally seem indifferent to what they are seeing -- but this is no different than what I have seen in crowds of tourists dutifully trudging through the Louvre or Versailles or the Metropolitan Museum.  We have all experienced the notion that some places are "just too much" -- they are too big and overwhelming and, after a while, you just want to tick-off the highlights and get to a decent restaurant.  Most probably, Loznitza's film documents a certain deficiency in the imagination, a defect that is probably necessary if we are to lead reasonably successful lives.  It is not easy to imagine the suffering of another; something in our constitution, our fundamental make-up debars such imagination.  If the people in the film were to truly imagine what was done to the inmates of this camp, they would faint or collapse in helpless sorrow or go mad.  (And it's not just a failure in the imagination of the tourists -- if the testimony of Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl is believed, most of the inmates in these camps couldn't quite imagine what was happening either and those who survived seem to have endured often because they couldn't, or wouldn't, comprehend what was happening around them.)  I have often said this:  if one were sufficiently imaginative to truly grasp with empathy the human suffering occurring in any one square mile of a city, that person would go mad.  And, so, I can't exactly fault the tourists who are put to the test by Loznitza's lens and seem to fail by the rigorous standards that the film implies.