This text is about three film shots in the spring and summer of 1944, in an insurgent Paris and in the transit camps of Terezín in Czechoslovakia and Westerbork in The Netherlands. Going back to the origin of the images allows us to understand the minds of those who filmed them and to inquire their choices. It reveals their mental image of an event, their desire to make the event conform to their idea of it, and the difficulties they occasionally have in grasping what is going on. These shots also contain the part of history that is unintelligible to contemporaries. They preserve what the operator failed to see while mechanically recording a portion of reality. Thus the analyzed shots, fragile and deficient as they are, pave the way for a history as close as possible to those who made the event or were its victims. They open up questions such as the part art plays at the heart of barbarism, the ambivalence of so-called artistic collaboration, and the ability of cinema to become an instrument of liberation or resistance.
cinema; archival images; history; Liberation of Paris; French Resistance; transit camp; nazism
