THE PAST IS PRESENT
By: Jorge Mourinha
Tags: World War II, Film Criticism, Doclisboa, Movies, Film Festivals

That sin of forgetfulness and obliviousness is brought out in spades in Sergei Loznitsa’s masterful Austerlitz (2016), another stark, spare, austere work in the Belorussian director’s patient career, and also possibly his masterpiece. Shooting in long black-and-white takes in the former concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, with no commentary nor score, Loznitsa does nothing other than put down his camera and record scenes of visitors on the premises; I counted only 37 shots (give or take a couple) in the entire 90-minute-plus-credits length, and that alone makes it one of the most stunning, breathtaking film objects I’ve seen all year. If A German Life is a plea against forgetfulness, Austerlitz is a portrait of what can happen when you forget: it presents the death camps as checkmarks on cruise-ship or bus tours, obligatory stops in the tourist circuit where people will take selfies against the infamous “arbeit macht frei” signs on the doors or the ovens.

Just like the Germans became a puppet people in the hands of the Nazis, the tourists visiting the camps are here de-individualized into a shapeless mass of consumers that seem to be at the camps less because of their wish to learn with the past and more because it’s “something you do” when visiting Germany. The callousness may be unwitting, but the matter-of-factness of Loznitsa’s handling, using merely the passage of time within each of its shots, makes it no less shocking; it’s as if the Holocaust, or the very heart of its horror, has been commodified, packaged, stripped of its weight and gravitas to become just another tourist attraction. The title reference to W. G. Sebald’s momentous classic merely underlines how much Austerlitz wants to make us aware of those dangers.

A still from ATOMIC. © Hopscotch Films/Crossover Labs, courtesy of Doclisboa

These dangers are also what puts Mark Cousins’ Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise (2015) in play. The passionate Irish film writer and filmmaker, whose masterpiece remains the multi-part The Story of Film book/film, harvests and repurposes archival footage (both documental and fictional) from the last 70 years to creat a powerful, propelling collage about the terrors and wonders of the atomic age. Scored by the epic, soaring rumbles of Scottish rock band Mogwai’s dreamy score, Atomic is a stellar example of the film-essay at its best, informed by that inextricably British way of connecting serious history and popular culture; a taut, compact throwback to a historical time teetering (as the subtitle points out) between “dread and promise”, but also to a tradition of mind-expanding, idiosyncratic sensory film experiences. None of this, Cousins seems to say, would be possible if the horrors of WWII hadn’t happened, and you can’t untangle its dread from its promise, its celebration from its admonishment, or its past from our present — the long arm of that particular tear in the fabric of history continues to cast a long shadow over our very own time. Forgetting, it seems to say, is not an option.

The global availability of Peter Watkins’ films can be consulted at his official website; Culloden, The War Game and Privilege are available on UK DVD from the BFI. A German Life premiered at the Visions du Réel festival in Switzerland last summer and Austerlitz at the Venice Film Festival last September; both films are currently doing the festival rounds. Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise is out on UK DVD from Hopscotch Films.