You ask me to describe the landscapes as they were seen on successive trips . This reminds me of crossing the same landscape , several times , during which your gaze settles on successive layers . We only see once into the present , but knowledge , habit and memory bring nuance to the gaze and create optical effects , depth of field , transparency and overlap . There is therefore a first time , which is very important because the retina is supposed to be untouched by these images and will be overwhelmed by the discovery , and sometimes saturated . However , the mind is weighed down with stories , images from films , photographs and the imagination that they have produced in us . So our gaze hesitates between astonishment and the quest for confirmation : does it match what I know or what I expect ? Visual emotions can be contradictory : the city of Lublin is so important in Polish Jewish history and an enormous amount of imaginative work is required to visually re-inscribe this history in a quest for traces . Yet the concentration camp , which became the State Museum at Majdanek in November 1944 , remains almost intact , like its crematorium ovens and one of its gas chambers . I am terrified by the height of its ceiling ( 1.90 m max ) and the crushing feeling it produces in me . Then there is a crossing , alternating agricultural plains with isolated habitats and dense forests . I cannot help but receive them and “ read ” them in light of the possibilities of escape and stalking in open ground or , on the contrary , in the shelter of trees , in a continuity and discontinuity of risks . We then approach what would become the epicentre of the film : the small town of Wlodawa , the Biala lakes , the hamlets of Zlobek and Sobibor Stacza and Sobibor forest bordered by the Bug river to the east . Wlodawa , a Jewish town and trading crossroads before the war , the industrial flagship of the military tannery of the former Soviet bloc , is a deprived border town today . I learned that the mainly Ukrainian non-Jewish population was displaced after the war . We must then think that the people we met did not witness the event . Closer to Sobibor , 10 km away , the peasant hamlets show a certain human and sociological continuity . It is summer and I see that this forest is crossed in all
directions by gatherers , hikers , cyclists , loggers and lovers and that 10 km away we have never heard of Sobibor . I then understand that this landscape is seen and experienced from many different points of view and experiences and that its present fiercely resists historical reduction . But it is the forest that produces this cognitive and emotional dissonance in me in the first place . This is indeed the place (“ das ist das Platz ” according to the famous Shoah formula ). The monumental pits covered with shards of white marble according to their exact layout bear witness to this . But it is a varied place where nature is not only the land of the event . Nature gains ground , loses it , produces food , materials , regenerates , bears the traces of murder and adapts to it . This is what I tried to translate through images by searching for this temporality specific to nature , as well as the micro gazes that can account for these many different forms of life when juxtaposed , which of course include death .
This Polish word for landscape , which you have taught me , gives a good account of what one can experience when faced with the landscape of Sobibor : it is the country , the place as a territory , but also the singular gaze of the person who looks at the picture , as well as that of the person who painted it .
4 . Sheol poster . Arnaud Sauli © Dublin Films
Deep VIEW
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