The situations are difficult to imagine. In 1944 and 1945, prisoners in Nazi death camps sneaked cameras into Auschwitz, Birchenau, Buckenwald, and Dachau. The photographers risked torture and death (well, even a worse death, should that have been possible) to chronicle aspects of existence in these hell holes. Yes, hell holes where Nazis starved and brutalized their victims.
In the French documentary, From Where They Stood, released for streaming and on disc recently by Kino Lorber, director Christophe Cognet invites historians and translators to join him in retracing the paths of these daring photographers who hid cameras and, when they felt the time was right, took photographs. Surviving are photos of men in striped pajamas, men in underwear or wrapped in a blanket, women naked who are about to face death in the gas chambers. We see photos of buildings that housed the gas chambers and fellow prisoners dragging naked corpses to their final mass graves. There are S.S. guards with guns. There is a camp cinema that doubled as a place of torture, a brothel where women who were transferred from Ravensbruck concentration camp to Dachau became unwilling whores to pleasure Nazis. There are photos of prisoners victimized by Nazi medical people. Some were injected with gangrene, some had bones broken and removed, so many used as human guinea pigs.
The Nazis tried every possible means to accomplish the genocide of the Jews. They killed six million Jews by the end of the war. Also, Romany and Sinti people, Communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others were rounded up and either murdered upon entrance to these camps or held as forced labor. Many men, women, and children with disabilities, never made it to camps; they simply were killed.
Christophe Cognet has been making documentaries since the early 1990s. I have not seen his other films, but a number of them have been selected for showing at film festivals. One of the documentaries by Cognet is titled Because I was a Painter, released in 2013. This film looks into the thousands of artworks found in concentration camps upon their liberation in 1945.
Cognet has chosen topics of significance. However, I question his cinematic style, his presentation. Early on in From Where They Stood, we see a close-up of hands removing a roll of photographic film stock from its container. The right hand is gloved as it should be. But the left hand is bare and soon starts touching the original, the archival material. Yikes, as an archivist, I wanted to yell for him to keep his greasy finger off the best surviving material of unique photo negatives.
Cognet spends so much time, sequence after sequence, on-camera himself with historians, placing the exact original location of the hidden camera—two feet to the left, etc... His audience does not need to know exact locations. We spend too much time watching Cognet and his experts chatting about the way the photos were shot. The content of each unique photo should be the focal point, not their discussions. Especially during the first half, he does not make that content clear enough to the viewer.
So, I thank M. Cognet for bringing these photos to light. Their value is precious. From Where They Stood needs to be seen. But I wish his approach had been less on himself and his colleagues and more on the content of the photographs.
For an example of brilliant documentary filmmaking on a related topic, I strongly recommend the new three-part series The U.S. and the Holocaust which recently ran on PBS.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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