Austerlitz – Films – Visions du Réel

Sergei Loznitsa
Germany | 2016 | 94 min
Languages : English, German
Subtitles : English, French

The former Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, has become a popular tourist destination. A strange, connected tribe roams across it in all directions, smartphones at the ready. In static long takes, Loznitsa observes the group as it itself observes, watches the rituals and meditates on the meaning of this place of memory that has become a consumer good like any other.

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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