VISUAL DIARY. Is that okay to judge?(edit analysis)
Through the course and especially during the working process on my project, I have thought a lot about different types of gazes that anthropologists address or facing. My edit analysis will be about one of those gazes. This one can be considered as a “judgmental gaze” — and we as viewers of the film are the ones who internalize it.
The subject of my edit analysis is a film of Ukrainian-German filmmaker Serhii Loznytsia. Austerlitz is a well-composed monochrome observational film, which shows the random scenes from the German Holocaust places of memory and ex-concentration camps Dachau and Sachsenhausen. The main idea of the director was to show how mass tourism commodified and simplified the memory of the Holocaust. So, this is both critics of the modern cultural industry and politics of the memory. The film’s main character is a crowd — this is Loznytsia’s favorite character, which, as for me, can be problematic as it leads to overgeneralizing assumptions about the individuals who appear to be a part of the group.
Austerlitz is the number of long, well-composed shots — it is very observational. Loznytsia intentionally chose to film scenes in the summer, while it used to be vacation time. He called it hyperbole methods in one of the interviews — “you bring something to light to make it more visible.” In one of the film’s first scenes, we see people near the famous gates to Dachau with the sign “Arbeit Macht Frei.” The shot is long enough to show how people take photos or selfies in front of the sign, sometimes even smiling. It is disturbing and even painful to watch. In the background, we hear different languages, mainly English, casual conversations, sounds of the various cameras.
Austerlitz is a voyeuristic film. The camera is hidden, so people who are observed do not know about it. Thus, they act more natural from one point of view and do not perform for the camera. This position of seeing the other and being invisible creates a strange standpoint of the viewer, whose gaze is associated with the filmmaker’s gaze. We are in the position to judge. We see others, but we are not seen.
Is that okay to judge? I’ve asked myself recently in the case of the cultural memory and the critics of the contemporary attempts to commodify trauma. But it is also important not to overgeneralize the experiences of other people.
