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ХАРуН ФАРOЦКИ
hARUN fAROCKi
152
Respite
Harun Farocki’s Respite resurrects film footage shot by
Rudolf Breslauer, a temporary inmate of the Dutch transit
camp for Jews, Westerbork. Commissioned by the camp’s
SS commandant, Breslauer films the unloading and loading
of incoming and outgoing trains, footage of prisoner
processing, and devotes much of his footage to the varied
work and activities of the inmates. The surviving, mostly
unedited footage and Farocki’s silent intertitle commentary
is ambiguous despite the simplicity of content and the
surprising specificity of the filmmaker’s research—from
a barely visible stamp on a suitcase the titles identify not
only the person in the image, but the specific date the
footage was taken as well as the woman’s place and date
of death. What the footage initially seems to show is a rare
concentration camp that relatively free of violence, death,
and an oppressive atmosphere of pain and suffering. Some
smiles, a sensed ambiance, camp theatrical productions
and group exercises would seem to support this impression.
But of course like all images, these are produced; Farocki
indicates that the underpopulated camp was in danger of
being closed down, so Breslauer’s film of productive labor
certainly had its own purposes from the Nazi side. More
interesting though is that, as Farocki correctly points out,
the audience’s familiarity with ”conventional” images of
concentration camps will almost definitely conflict with
or overlay the Westerbork documentary, giving the images
an aura of death that may not have actually existed there.
This burden of knowledge and the weigh of accepted
representations even makes Breslauer’s footage seem
intrinsically untrustworthy, if not downright blinded, even
if these things are not true. (A lone close-up of a sorrowful
child’s face does seem to speak for what Breslauer purposefully
shot around). That Breslauer was a victim, and
eventually a fatality, of the concentration camp system
yet somehow was able to produce a documentary, however
compromised, of the daily make-up of camp life is remarkable
in itself. Farocki’s appreciation and commentary
on this footage not only serves a possible purpose of
re-consideration of generally accepted visual understandings
and impressions of the concentration camp system, but
also speaks for how the possible revelations and new
knowledge to be found in Breslauer’s work will be forever
compromised due to the hyper-prevalence of images that
speak counter to this documentary work.
(Daniel Kasman. Memories. On Moving Images &
Motion Pictures. October 3, 2007)
A prefacing text on the source of the found film provides
the sobering context to the seemingly mundane scene
of weary, confused passengers deboarding a train at
a desolate station in wartime Europe. Filmed from the
German transit camp in occupied Westerbork in the
Netherlands, the assorted 16mm footage of “everyday
life” at the camp was photographed in 1944 by an inmate,
Rudolf Breslauer (who was subsequently deported and
killed), under orders from the SS commander, Albert
Gemmeker, who, in turn, commissioned the film in order
to showcase the productivity of the transit camp (Gemmeker
would subsequently testify that he had envisioned the
project as a film for tourists) and, implicitly, its integral
role in the German war machine as both a raw materials
recycling facility and a deportation hub for trains leaving,
every Tuesday morning, for the concentration camps of
Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Sobibor.
Composed as a silent essay film, Farocki’s use of repeating
images that are further emphasized by the spareness of
intertitles reflects his expositions on the role of filmmaking
as the creation of afterimages. In essence, by working with
the artifacts of Breslauer’s found film, Farocki’s role becomes
one, not of image production, but rather, a kind of image
archaeology, where reality is sought in the critical observation,
juxtaposition, correlation, and interpretation of (absolute)
images. In one repeated sequence from Breslauer’s
sole shot footage of a departing train, a brief close-up of a
Pages 146–153:
stills from Respite, 2007
video, black and white, silent with English intertitles, 40 minutes
a collaboration with antje Ehmann, christiane hitzemann, lars Pienkoß, matthias
rajmann, jan ralske, meggie schneider
courtesy harun farocki filmproduktion.
harun farocki was born in 1944 in the czech republic and is now based in germany. as a filmmaker, artist and writer harun
farocki is one of a number of European auteurs who explore the limits of representation in so-called ”essay films”. he once
stated that his films were made ”against the cinema and against the television”. a permanent commentary on the medium, his
works prompt a deep analysis of images and their place in society, with a sharp focus on warfare and revolutionary processes.
gaunt and visibly frightened girl is framed, initially within
the context of the Germans’ penchant for precision and
accuracy (in meticulously posting a correction to the accoun-
ting of people who had been loaded into a boxcar), then
subsequently, in her identification as a ten-year-old Sinti
girl named Settela Steinbach that leads to Farocki’s theory
on Breslauer’s apparent rejection of close-ups in subsequent
footage. Similarly, the footage of inmates extracting copper
wires and fibers from electrical conduit is also repeated in
the film, as both a demonstration of worker efficiency, and
an allusion to the figurative recycling of human bodies
(particularly, in the extraction of ”Auschwitz gold” from
the teeth of the dead). Alternately exposing inherent half
truths (shots of smiling inmates at work and at their leisure
omit the underlying reality that their expression is one of
relief for their temporary reprieve from the weekly
deportation train), unintentional humor (in the Germans’
repackaging of the camp as a corporate venture with its
own company logo and productivity charts), and overt
propaganda (in the repeated, often slowmotion demonstrations
of efficient manual labor and the deliberate low
profile of Nazis around the camp that provide a false impres-
sion of the inmates’ relative freedom), the idiosyncratic
repetition of images serves, not only to reinforce the after-
image, but also to reframe the image through its differing
contexts—through its permutations of assigned meaning.
(Filmref. Views from the Avant-Garde, October 4, 2007)
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