There is
something unnervingly eerie about dead silence in a motion picture. Not quiet,
but total silence.
French documentarian Christophe Cognet uses this quality
brilliantly in his new film Because I Was a Painter, a meditation on the work
of artists who were prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps.Taking a useful
leaf from the Claude Lanzmann playbook, Cognet shows us contemporary footage of
the artists being interviewed, of the museums and their curators in which the
works are preserved and the camps including Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka and
Buchenwald.
Gray skies over Buchenwald
Cognet is trying valiantly to reach some sort of conclusion about
the dangers of aestheticizing mass murder, returning repeatedly to the image of
an empty gray sky, but the poignancy of the drawings on display here makes for
a fascinatingly dissonant experience.
It's the sort of film in which Zoran Music can write of his time in the camps that he felt compelled to depict "all the inner pain" in the faces of the dead, adding "I drew all that because I was a painter," yet Walter Spitzer can tell the filmmakers "I wasn't a painter, I was only 17."
A thoughtful, intelligent and discomfiting film and, because of its severely restricted subject matter, a somewhat fresh perspective on the Shoah. (Currently playing at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema.
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