Austerlitz – Films – Visions du Réel

Sergei Loznitsa
Deutschland | 2016 | 94 min
Sprachen : Englisch, Deutsch
Untertitel : Englisch, Französisch

Das ehemalige nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen in der Nähe von Berlin ist zu einem vielbesuchten Touristenziel geworden. Eine merkwürdige, vernetzte Sippe durchstreift es mit dem Smartphone in der Hand. In langen, statischen Plansequenzen beobachtet Loznitsa diese Menschen, während sie ihrerseits Beobachtungen anstellen. Er verfolgt ihre Rituale und meditiert über die Bedeutung dieses Orts der Erinnerung, der sich zu einem Konsumgut wie jedes andere entwickelt hat.

The camera focuses on an elegant metal gate, on which is inscribed – half-obscured by the anonymous figures in shorts and t-shirts posing in front – a maxim of grim memory: “Arbeit Macht Frei”. As often, the key to the mystery is not revealed immediately; we gradually apprehend the space and its architecture, like a static observer amid the throng of people pressing forward in a disorderly crowd, within the bounds of what was the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Austerlitz – in homage to the title of the final book published by W.G. Sebald – is the filmmaker’s first feature-length documentary shot outside the post-Soviet territory, to which he remains nonetheless connected through the tragedy of History. The stillness of the frames contrasts with the casual air of the tourists passing through, barely pausing to “shoot” something off-screen, as if consuming it. Only a few are struck with vertigo while walking through this place, conceived by human minds to efficiently administer the extermination of their own kind. Wordlessly, Loznitsa confronts us with the grimly ironic spectacle of memorial tourism.

Emmanuel Chicon

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