The Auschwitz Album

"Maybe this list is a frustration of articles I haven’t written and movies I haven’t made. I had thought about doing it. I was going to interview Lilly Jacob, and then she died. Lilly Jacob’s family was killed at Auschwitz, but she survived and ended up at Dora, a concentration camp inside Germany. She found a book of photos there, in an SS barracks where she was recovering from typhus after the liberation of the camp. In it were people that she knew. Yes. She found pictures of herself, her relatives and others from the village where they had lived, who were all dead. In 1944 they were liquidating – it’s a horrific word – they were murdering the Hungarian Jews, and here you have an album of close to 200 photographs that were taken by SS men who were on the platform that day in Birkenau [an Auschwitz sub-camp], documenting the selection of Jews for the gas chamber. She took the album with her to America where she emigrated. She ended up as a waitress in Miami and people heard about this album, and went to her looking for family. Eventually, [ Holocaust scholar] Raul Hilberg persuaded her to donate the album to Yad Vashem [Israel’s memorial to Holocaust victims] where it is today. Again, it fascinates me because it’s a group of photographs centred around one historical moment. We’re really thrown into that moment. It’s the attempt to understand something that maybe can never be understood. We look at the SS officers on the platform and the many, many Jews, most of whom have only hours to live if that. We know that we’re connected to history here, but what is it that we’re looking at? On the one hand we know, and on the other hand we don’t know. We’re looking at something deeply disturbing and mysterious. It is one of the more extraordinary series of photographs. I sometimes talk about the trunk in the attic. You go up to the attic, you find a trunk, you open it and there’s some photographs inside. Maybe you know the people, maybe you don’t. You look at the photographs and you want to know more. You want to know something about the people in them. Who they are, who they were. Again, what are we really looking at? It’s a mystery. An attempt to contextualise – I hate the word but I use it anyway – the photograph is the beginning of the investigation. I feel the pull of The Auschwitz Album very powerfully. We’re looking at something that is indecent, it’s cruel beyond imagination and yet it’s real. It concerns real people and real historical events. I want to know more, to reconnect myself to that history. They’re both of a piece, investigating with a camera. I’ve learned as a documentary filmmaker how you can investigate. I’ve been lucky to solve – in part using a camera – at least one mystery, involving a terrible miscarriage of justice in Texas . [Morris’s 1988 film The Thin Blue Line presented evidence that a man was on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. The inmate was released within a year of the film’s release.] I don’t look at documentary filmmaking as anything more than an obsession with the world and what’s real. That impulse is in my filmmaking, and it’s certainly in this book I’ve just written. There’s a passage in Believing is Seeing where I talk about posing – how all images are posed. There is no veridical image. There is no ur-image. There is no image that is more truthful than another. It’s a misconception about truth and it’s a misconception about the pursuit of truth. One of the deep misconceptions about documentary is that it’s more truthful if you hand-hold your camera or use available light. Truth isn’t about style. That’s what makes it so absurd that the Academy didn’t even consider The Thin Blue Line for an award. The Thin Blue Line did what a documentary movie should do – it pursued the truth. It got an innocent man out of prison, not by virtue of the fact that I shot it in one style or another but by virtue of the fact that I investigated with a camera and uncovered the truth. I don’t think that documentary has to be vérité or agitprop or narrated slideshows or whatever. But I do think that it has to try to uncover something about reality, investigating something to find things out. I think it’s a noble and worthy enterprise. What else would I do with myself?"