Christoph Cognet’s “From Where They Stood” scrutinizes the amazing Holocaust record. Photo taken secretly by prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps. Cognet’s analytical documentary employs a stance of investigating historians to explain photographs created and smuggled at deadly risk.
Unlike many Holocaust documentaries, this film relies on still images rather than archived footage or interviews with survivors. Cognet works with scholars to scrutinize these photographs and their proof of silence. One image reveals that a woman with a wound on her leg is the subject of a Nazi medical experiment. Other portraits capture people in a rest that looks eerily calm.
But the secret photo, known as Sonderkommando photo, has the most significant weight of all. These ghostly images depict a naked woman on her way to the gas chamber and then a corpse left in the field (both scenes are a cremation prisoner worker known as Sonderkommando). Is being monitored by). These numbers, apparently taken through a hole in the gas chamber from a considerable distance, are small and not well defined, but not so devastating.
Cognet (who also created a documentary about the artwork created at the camp) visits the camp site and recreates the exact location and line of sight of the photographer and his subject. His films can feel overly cerebral, like rushing into a seminar, and text cards do a lot of descriptive hard work. However, Cognet’s forensic approach claims to commemorate these events in a significant, physically specific way, creating a world without living witnesses to these fears, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Predict quietly.
From where they stood
Unrated. French, Polish, German, with subtitles. Execution time: 1 hour 55 minutes. At the theater.
