AUSTERLITZ
Monuments to indifference
Ostensibly a documentary, AUSTERLITZ straddles a hair-fine line between detached observation and deliberate orchestration. Shot in the "preserved memorials" of Nazi death camps at Sachsenhausen and Dachau (complete with tour guides and picnic areas), this narration-free work of ‘slow cinema’ considers, among other things, the purpose and attraction of holocaust tourism while inviting the viewer to examine their own responses.
AUSTERLITZ is a more direct riff on themes found in Chantal Akerman’s D’EST (From the East, 1993) and Alain Resnais's more poetic NIGHT AND FOG (1954), two eloquent examinations of the impotence of memory and the inevitable dissolution of history. As Loznitsa says in his director’s notes, the film observes “the mannerisms of tourists, people who are broadly interested in everything – or whose role as tourists obliges them to be”. Loznitsa aligns himself with the tourists, with whom he admits to sharing the same ‘typical curiosities’, but he’s also curious about the impulse that drives thousands to spend a sunny summer’s day wandering around locations that were the scene of atrocities.
In this sense, AUSTERLITZ is about the holocaust only in as much as it serves as a background to observe the present. The film is about looking and seeking, and it tries to reflect our compulsion to "understand" the unfathomable darkness of humankind. Maybe these tourists are attempting, on some subliminal level, to bear witness, which may be a motivation for Loznitsa, too, an attempt to reconcile indefensible barbarity with what we assume to be fundamental to humanity, begging the question, "How could this happen?"
Employing a fixed camera long-takes to emphasise his observational aesthetic, Loznitsa shows people looking at the shadows of the past, but the film is also about people (us) looking at people looking — a fascination with voyeurism that is, of course, central to cinema. In this respect, it's an intellectually and formally rigorous addition to his films about the power and purpose of images, films like BLOCKADE (2005), FACTORY (2004), REVUE (2008), MAIDAN (2014), THE EVENT (2016), and especially LANDSCAPE (2003). Like these works, AUSTERLIZT suggests that the harder we look, the less we see until the past virtually evaporates. But the film also considers silence and stillness, the eerie sound of places that are now silent, beautifully underscored by an expertly composed sound design. It’s a silence that speaks to the simultaneous importance and impotence of shrines to exceptional but by no means unprecedented horror.
Loznitsa dares viewers to judge the endless stream of day-trippers who file in and out in orderly and respectful groups of families and friends. But the inescapable and glaring fact, the central (subversive) thrust of Loznitsa’s argument, is that these people are not ‘those people’ — they are us, and we are them, just as the victims and perpetrators of atrocities are also us and we are them. While some tourists are obviously affected by what they see, many take it in their stride and tick the trip off their holiday ‘to-do’ list.
Decked out in branded T-shirts, the tourists are simply who they are — the grandchildren of a long-gone, painfully silent generation — and just as many will arrive the next day and the next, casual daytrippers ushered along by well-meaning but necessarily reductive patter and proficiency of tour guides, a repetitive process that ironically creates a curiously reassuring distance between (as well as an unnerving resemblance to) the emaciated ghosts of history. Likewise, the branding and slogans on summer wear also offer a similarly reassuring distance, not just from past horrors but the often conveniently overlooked suffering of the present day.
AUSTERLITZ is also about the ‘normalisation’ of human suffering, how memorials intended to honour the victims of atrocities and remind us of humankind's capacity to inflict unconscionable horror risk becoming monuments to indifference. In fact, the notion of 'indifference' may be key to understanding Loznitsa’s challenging film, one that shows us one thing in order to address something else, something as dark and disturbing but happening right in front of our eyes.