Josef
Richter’s life could inspire a truly great narrative film. In 1943, the Polish
resistance fighter knowingly infiltrated Sobibor with the express intention of
documenting the horrors within. Since smuggling in a camera would be
impractical, Richter smuggled out hand-drawings of concentration camp life. (Conveniently
for screenwriters, almost nothing else is known about the rest of his life,
leaving ample room for artistic license.) Although his intent was more
journalistic than artistic, Richter is justly included in Christphe Cognet’s
study of the art and artists that survived the Holocaust in Because I was a Painter (trailer here), which opens today
in New York.
Painters
paint and sketch artists sketch. That is what they do, regardless where they
might be. Therefore, the artists consigned to the National Socialist camps
logically used their art to process the madness. Some sought beauty amid the
terror, while others considered such attempts impossible. Indeed, this is the
great pseudo-debate of Because, but
it is hardly one viewers can join. After all, every artist profiled in the film
came to their opinions by enduring the worst humanity can inflict on fellow
human beings.
Obviously,
the work featured in the film is extremely powerful and extreme in nature.
Unfortunately, Cognet’s detached, slow cinema approach does not always serve his
subject matter particularly well. He deliberately keeps the audience at arm’s
length, interspersing his interviews with long, drawn-out tracking shots of the
former camp sites that now look deceptively peaceful and overgrown by nature.
Yes,
time moves forward, but the past can still haunt the present (and the future).
More narrative structure and more context would increase our understanding of
the artists Cognet profiles. Some pieces, such as Dinah Gottliebova’s portraits
of Mengele’s experiment subjects (previously documented in Hilary Helstein’s
more aesthetically conventional As Seen Through These Eyes), need the barest of background to be fully appreciated.
For the most part though, their work literally speaks for itself.
Indeed,
the work of the artists surveyed is so powerful precisely because it
incorporates art as it is ideally understood, as well as a form of journalistic
documentation and a method of asserting one’s existence. There are many
valuable sequences and riveting oral histories in the film, but Cognet’s
stylistic severity is sometimes counter-productive. Even though it can be
frustrating, it is still good that we have this film. Recommended for students
of art and history, Because I was a
Painter opens today (4/24) in New York, at the Lincoln Plaza.
