zeitgeschichte|online: Working as a director of documentary films you have spent many years studying the Shoah, NS concentrations and extermination camps and the biographies of the victims and the survivors. You have already devoted three films to these subjects: L'atelier de Boris (The Boris' Studio, 2004), Quand nos yeux sont fermés (When our eyes are closed, 2008), and Parce que j'étais peintre (Because I was a painter, 2013). Your book , published by Editions du Seuil in 2019, also is written on the same subject as well. What was your motivation to continue your work on the subject in À pas aveugles (From where there stood)?
Christophe Cognet: After Because I was a painter, I thought I had completed my work on this subject, in the form of travel. But something in me resisted this feeling: taking my research, I had already come across most of the clandestine photos that are in From Where They Stood, choosing not to include them, because that would have made the film too imprecise. And one day I discovered Leib Rochmann's book, "with blind steps across the world", and thinking about this very beautiful title, something resonated in me: I told myself that the drawings were above all a question of gaze and less body, while for the photographs it is the opposite. You don't have to be physically in front of the subject of your drawing to do this. In a concentration camp, you can watch an execution for example and draw the corresponding picture from memory in the evening in a block. On the other hand, to take a photo, you have to be there physically in front of the subject, but not necessarily aiming in the camera or even looking at what you are photographing. It was the case of pictures of George Angeli to Buchenwald and certainly a part of those of Alberto Errera Birkenau. This simple realization made me want to make this film: a body that moves in a place, a question about the look and the images, these are questions of cinema: this film is more physical and harsher than the previous, which was more "mental" (in the sense of the " cosa mentale"). And the Book comes from the film project: an editor (one of the most important in France), Le Seuil, found out that I was preparing a film on this topic, he read the first draft of the film project and offered to write the book, which was therefore written during the entire preparation period of the film.
zeitgeschichte|online: No film has ever dealt head-on with the clandestine photographs taken in the Nazi camps. What was your inspiration to make this film on clandestine photographs?
Cognet: We have seen the photographs and the films shot by the Allies upon their discovery of the camps, that's how we visualized the camps and the Shoah. But what about the images that were captured by the deportees themselves? The need to represent the camps from the inside, by the very victims of the Nazi system, is absolutely essential. It's about the spirit of resistance (in every sense of the word), but also the need to bear witness to the mistreatment, the appalling living conditions, the torture, and the assassinations that occurred in those camps. It's about countering the images of concentration camps as controlled by the SS, and addressing the very essence of the death camps, which were designed to be concealed from the outside world and to prevent any representation of what occurred inside. These images are essential because they're the only ones that share a common experience- the photographers and the subjects of these photographs, all being in the camps together. This sense of equality is a determining factor in both the status and the very nature of these images-something the photographs, films, and drawings made by the Allies upon their discovery of the camps simply cannot achieve-the common fate that binds the one taking the picture and the one who appears in the photograph.
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