Zhong Jiang Film Review
Filmography:
The Mauthausen concentration camp is one of the largest concentration camps in Europe. More than 7,200 Spaniards were imprisoned here. A Spanish photographer named Francisco Boyx was also imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp during World War II. Because of his excellent photography talent, he was selected by Nazi officers to become a photographer in the concentration camp, taking photos and recording for German officers and prisoners, and was deeply trusted by the German army.
With the art of photography, Francisco Boyx has escaped a lot of hard labor and witnessed countless sins that cannot disappear. The evidence of evil that is frozen on film silently indicts this inhuman everything, and life is destroyed like grass in the trampling of human nature. All this gave Francisco Boyx the idea of collecting films documenting the crimes of German dictators, convinced that justice would come and that evil would be judged.
Later in World War II, when the Germans were defeated on the battlefield, the Mauthausen concentration camp would also be abandoned. Before leaving, the Germans ordered the burning of all documents and photographs in an attempt to destroy the atrocious crime. Francesco Boyx, under close surveillance by the Germans, tactfully and bravely preserved a large number of photo negatives.
With the allied liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945, Francisco Boyx began another job: collecting evidence of Nazi incriminating. Eventually he found more than 20,000 photographs, equivalent to a third of the total number of photographs taken by the inmates task force responsible for taking them. At the Nuremberg trials and the Dachau trials, Boyx presented the most powerful photographs of the prisoners--- in which the bodies of the prisoners were covered with bullet holes and the surviving prisoners were also skinny... These are the strongest evidence of the Holocaust.
Because of these photographs and negatives preserved and collected by Francisco Boyx, the brutality of the German Nazis was finally made public, and the lives sprinkled with blood here were rested!
The Cinematographer in the Concentration Camp is a historical biopic of war directed by Mar Tagarona, written by Roger Dennis / Alfred Pérez Faals, and starring Mario Casas / Richard van Wyden / Alain Hernandez / Adria Salazar / Eduard Buch / Stefan Venet / Frank Fis / Luca Peros / Macarena Gomez / Dennis Uilokhi / Marianne Kochish, and was released in Spain on October 26, 2018. This film is adapted from real events, from the old photos left by real events to connect the plot, "The Photographer in the Concentration Camp" uses a calm "bystander" angle, no longer with justice and evil, but with human nature to judge human behavior, the cruelty is torn to the viewer one by one, presenting a more complex and changeable ideology in this world.
During World War II, a total of 199,404 prisoners were imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Of these, about 119,000 died of harsh conditions, exhaustion, malnutrition and overwork, including 38,120 Jews and at least five Chinese. Of the 5 Chinese, 2 died in the concentration camp, and the cause of death column read "poor circulation, acute colitis." This is a common cause of death in concentration camp archives, but it is often not. Another survivor died five days after the camp was liberated.
After the end of World War II, the Mauthausen concentration camp was converted into a memorial. After discovering that Chinese of the victims were among them, the Chinese government erected a monument to the compatriots killed in the camp in the name of the Chinese Embassy in Austria. On May 11, 2003, the Mauthausen concentration camp held a ceremony to unveil the monument to the Chinese compatriots killed. The dark marble monument is engraved with the words: "In memory of the Chinese compatriots killed in this concentration camp."
The prototype of Francisco Boyx's historian in The Photographer in the Camp should be William Brasser (1917-2012), a survivor of Auschwitz recorded in Auschwitz's Photographer: A Documentary on the Life of William Brasser. William Brasser, a Polish photographer, was arrested by the Nazis on 31 August 1940 and subsequently sent to Auschwitz, No. 3444. From 15 February 1941, he was transferred to the Identification Section and forced to take photographs of the SS, including not only archival photographs of prisoners, but also notorious "medical trials". Through the viewfinder, he saw a skinny Jewish child, a naked Jewish girl for "ethnographic research", twins for "medical experiments"... It was a pair of eyes full of fear, a face that didn't go much, and he could do too little.
In 1945, when Soviet troops approached Auschwitz, Blasser was asked to destroy all photographs, but he risked his life to keep a large number of negatives, which are now valuable documents for witnessing Auschwitz's history. But Brasser could no longer hold up the camera, because the faces of fear were always in the viewfinder, lingering...
Today's film records our beautiful life, recording the moments we remember or remember now. In this film, the film records a helpless and desperate person.
In "The Photographer in the Concentration Camp", each prisoner is divided into different classes and levels of power through the triangular markings on the prison uniform. The first wave of prisoners was mainly composed of extrajudicial criminals, murderers and others. They became loyal dogs of the German army and used their sticks to declare to others that they had the right to tyranny.
On Francesco Boyx's chest is a blue S, symbolizing the stateless who lost their country, freedom and dignity in the war. These are the "backbone" of the entire camp, the hard-working undertakers, and they face the threat of death every day.
The more unique class symbols are explained at the beginning of the film, and the brutality of the concentration camp hierarchy is expressed very bluntly through the relationship of interdependence and exploitation of these three classes.
In the Mauthausen concentration camp, there are 35 ways to die: entering the gas chamber, injecting poison, freezing to death, being split alive by dogs...
All kinds of perverted medical experiments, inhuman labor, frequent beatings and cruelties, it is difficult to imagine how these inhuman acts were conceived;
The Nazis took guns and forced the prisoners to rush up the death ladder as fast as they could to die of exhaustion.
Although compared to most innocent victims who were tortured and maimed to death, Francisco Boyx's luck and expertise earned him slightly better treatment in the concentration camps - at least he survived, and even when he performed well, the German governors would make an exception to "reward" him for having female war criminals accompany him... But at the end of the day, he remained a prisoner for five years, so Francisco Boyx never had, and it is unlikely, to document every aspect of Mauthausen from the perspective of a journalist or documentary filmmaker. His task was simply to take dossier photographs of the prisoners exactly as requested by the SS squad leader.
The requirements are as follows:
"Male prisoners need to shave neatly, and their faces cannot be seen to have marks of beatings, that is, there can be no bruised patches or bruised eye sockets, and there can be no purulent wounds. All prisoners with the above characteristics must be repatriated and their wounds healed first. ”
For the prisoners who met the requirements, Brasser was ordered to take portraits of each of them from three angles, front, side and front, but with the head turned to the right front.
In contrast, photographic German governors took real photographs outdoors in concentration camps. Francisco Boyx himself has an indelible impression of such photographs:
In the ice and snow, the male prisoners stood naked outdoors, and the German governor slowly filmed;
The corpses of prisoners were strewn across the snow, and the German governors took multi-angle photographs to prove that these prisoners were killed because they escaped, but Francisco Boyx found that all the bodies were shot in real life, not escape at all...
It is this comparison that gives our viewer a hint that, without being divorced from the historical context, Francisco Boyx's photographs of prisoners cannot be effectively assumed—monotonous, mundane, and full of german-given contradictions and lies. What is special about these dossiers of prisoners left by Francisco Boyx, compared to other testimonies, is precisely that they were taken exactly at the request of the Germans, that their functional significance needs to be completely limited to the scope of "speaking" according to the Germans' ideas. This sounds like a paradox, but it is indeed the greatest inspiration given to our posterity by Francisco Boyx's photographs.
The Germans are well aware that the best way to put history and news at their disposal is not to remain silent, but to invent a decent history for the object of their narrative according to their own needs. There is no doubt that the prisoners recorded real people with real names, but they asked Francisco Boyx to do strict "screening" work when taking pictures, such as only being male (this requirement was later broken), a neat shave, no scars on the face, and more obviously, the cause of death, whether the prisoner committed suicide or was tortured to death, his cause of death must only be selected from the list of natural deaths: heart disease, gastroenteritis and malignant constitution...
In this way, the Germans meticulously created one false history after another: history for other countries, history for the German public, and history for internal reference. This is probably why, in January 1945, as the Soviets approached the Auschwitz camp, Walter, the head of the Identification Section, furiously demanded the destruction of all of Corey's documents and photographs, which also contained internal documents that could only be viewed by senior SS officers, and which the Soviets could have meant to be made public if captured.
The evil deeds of history need to be remembered, and "The Photographer in the Concentration Camp" is both a memorial and a warning to the future. When we have watched "Night and Fog", read Levi's trilogy and Weisser's "Night", and then look at this biographical film, no matter how dull its plot is, the actor's acting skills do not portray the characters perfectly and in place, it is no longer a problem. Such a piece of history does not need to be described too much, and one film can say it all.
Francisco Boyx took history, not photographs; Francisco Boyx carried the light of life, not the images of death.
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