Ulrike Grote

Quote:
Images of the World and Inscription in War is an essay whose central motif is the aerial photograph of the camp at Auschwitz taken on April 4, 1944 by an American reconnaissance plane. On this photo, analysts identified the surrounding factories but not the concentration and extermination camp. Dialectic montage and a distanced commentary compose this film which analyses the conditions under which an image becomes readable. The gap from “seeing” to “knowing”, interlacing the polysemy of words and photographs.Read More »

Quote:
The vanishing point of is the conceptual image of the ‘blind spot’ of the evaluators of aerial footage of the IG Farben industrial plant taken by the Americans in 1944. Commentaries and notes on the photographs show that it was only decades later that the CIA noticed what the Allies hadn’t wanted to see: that the Auschwitz concentration camp is depicted next to the industrial bombing target. (At one point during this later investigation, the image of an experimental wave pool – already visible at the beginning of the film – flashes across the screen, recognizably referring to the biding of the gaze: for one’s gaze and thoughts are not free when machines, in league with science and the military, dictate what is to be investigated.Read More »