Of the images from the Nazi concentration camps, these are the ones that have left their mark on the photographic memory: those of the order in the barren barracks and those crammed into them on bare floors and beds, as well as those of the many ailing and the countless corpses, victims of killing and mistreatment , scattered on desolate terrain or even in heaps in advance of their mass burial. As is well known, these pictures were taken by the liberators, cameramen for the Allies. They are crime scene and crime victim photographs, taken in the immediate aftermath of the crime.
The French documentary filmmaker Christophe Cognet focuses on the comparatively very few others: images that show the everyday life of the prisoners, photographed by themselves, under the conditions of their comprehensive disenfranchisement in the camps. Disenfranchisement also meant that with each of these recordings they took a constant risk to life and limb.
Cognet’s film, entitled blind step will be broadcast for the first time as part of this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Presented at the Berlinale two years ago and filmed in pre-Corona times in the summer of 2019, it was accompanied by a book publication by the author with the French publisher Éditions du Seuil that same year. Unfortunately, the book is not available in a handful of libraries in this country. Because Cognet’s book – entitled “Eclats” (which could only be translated insufficiently with “Splinters of Light”) – explores the historical significance of his specimens far more comprehensively on more than 400 pages and armed with photo-theoretical tools.
Picture in picture: The old motif of a concentration camp barracks can no longer be seen under the overgrown trees.
(Photo: Celine Bozon/ZDF)
But the documentary is based on a different emphasis, since the photos appear sober at first glance; with a few exceptions, such as the three Polish women in the Ravensbrück concentration camp who demonstrated their status as, as they called it, “guinea pigs” in front of the camera of their companion Joanna Szydłowska. But when the Dachau photographs of prisoner Rudolf Císař, a former librarian and most recently a Czech spy, portray prisoners in front of the sick barracks in Sunday light, their resilience, as the archivist of the concentration camp memorial site there, Albert Knoll, comments, is less obvious shown in the photos – than in their illegality at the time. In the fact that they were made at all.
Scientists try on site to develop the recording position
The same applies to a photo of the crematorium there taken by the French prisoner Georges Angéli: the photographer himself found it so disturbingly peaceful after the war that he took a section of the picture with several fellow prisoners sunbathing on the chimney in front of it take appropriate lawn discounts, had retouched on numerous prints. Christophe Cognet is therefore concerned, as he emphasizes in the conversation, with the reconstruction of the respective “acte photographique”, the photographic process, which is to be understood in a purely physical, physical way: as a light trail of the picture object in front of the camera on the chemical emulsion of the film strip (completely in the sense of André Bazin and Roland Barthes) and as the image maker’s physical handling of his apparatus.
The efforts of the documentary filmmaker, in cooperation with the scientists at the memorial sites, then take many minutes to reveal the position of the concentration camp prisoners who were taking the photos at the time. Also acoustically (thankfully Cognet does without any background music) the walks across the site hardly want to end until the congruence between the original recording and the current location is reached. The result of the lengthy research: Many photos had been blinded without looking through the viewfinder, the camera was hidden under the arm or held at calf height and the body was bent over and thus removed from the control of any security personnel.
With old photos in search of new perspectives and connections: Christophe Cognet (left) researching lost time accompanied by Igor Bartoksik (right) from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.
(Photo: Celine Bozon/ZDF)
At the end of the film are the four now hieratic images from Auschwitz-Birkenau, taken from a tilted position. Alberto Errera, a member of the so-called “Sonderkommando” deployed in the gas chambers who was deported from Greece, had taken them in and was able to hand over the exposed films to the Polish resistance at the time. It is important to Cognet to prove that her testimony is not based solely on the subject of the picture of women stripping in the open air and then dead bodies burning there, but on the specific point of view of the shot from the inside of the building: the photographer was exactly where he was before the poison gas assassination took place. This is a statement that seems almost presumptuous in its technical factuality.
The title of Cognet’s film, in the original A pas aveugles, is owed to the novel “Mit blinde tret iber der erd”. It was written by Leïb Rochman, unnamed in the film, a Yiddish author who is still virtually undiscovered in this country. Together with his wife, he managed to escape a labor camp near Majdanek in 1942 and survived in a secret hiding place until liberation .
“Blind Steps”, on Monday at 10:25 p.m. on 3sat and until February 22nd in the media library.