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■ 159 ■ 4 ■ Europe at War in Color and Motion The camera pans across a snow-topped mountain range in central Europe , a man rows his boat with a child on a lake, there are mountains in the distance, and a doubles tennis match is being played on a glorious summer’s day. These images depict a picture-perfect scene. A train pulls into the central station in Warsaw, and the city’s pre–World War II skyline is the object of the camera’s fascination. A gleaming white rocket punctures the crisp blue sky. The skyline of Warsaw aside, these and other images could have been taken anywhere in pre–World War II Europe. They could have been shot by anyone at some time in the late 1930s or early 1940s. There is no sign of the war that we now know was being fought somewhere outside of these frames. We can see that they are old—the coloring alerts us to the use of Agfacolor reversible three-way color negative film—but other aspects of their provenance are unclear. Like Genewein’s photographs, these color moving images are objects of fascination for film scholars and historians. We are struck immediately by the brilliance of the turquoise-blue sky, the rich green of the lake, the grain of the image surface, the tactility of what are obviously early color film images, rich in temperature, tone, and hue; it is as though they have been carefully hand painted. The privilege of studying these film fragments in the archive is a rare opportunity to appreciate the complexity of each frame. But as we marvel at their color, the painterliness of their surfaces, the next image appears: the brilliant red of the Nazi swastika flag overwhelms the rest of the frame, filled as it is with sky, marching figures, the familiar and yet repulsive icons of power, criminality, and industrial murder. Our hearts sink, and we immediately distance ourselves from the films as for us they lose their beauty and conviction. The images were taken in the early 1940s by members of the German Army against the backdrop of a world at war. 10 ■ europe at war in color and motion Over the past ten to fifteen years, there has been a proliferation of documentaries made for European television, primarily in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The producers have scoured the archives for color amateur film footage taken in the years leading up to and during World War II. In such narratives this recycled footage is often misattributed or left unidentified. To give one example, of which there are many,¹ almost every television documentary that delves into the archives and represents the findings claiming to showcase rare visual material, depicts footage of the Warsaw ghetto. I now know that the material was from reel 20814 in the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin, taken by visiting ethnographers sometime between 1942 and 1943.² As I discuss them below, the images are ambiguous and multifaceted, without decisive indications of their intentions and the political or ideological allegiance of their cameraman. Partway through the BBC production The Third Reich in Colour (2001), the camera follows ghetto inhabitants going about their daily business. In particular, it follows people who wear the physical signs of their religious orthodoxy: men with uncut beards, pais, and hats. These ghetto inhabitants are not aware of being watched or, more precisely, surveyed. Upon reflection, however, there is a striking similarity between these images and those taken in the ghettos by Jews, particularly in Lodz and Warsaw. The images of Grossman, for example, may not be in motion, they may not be in color, but they do show similar traces of life caught unawares, clandestinely shot from the safety of an undisclosed vantage point. Like Grossman’s images, this color footage shifts to slow motion and includes obtuse angles, canted frames, uneven compositions. These images could have been taken by a camera placed in a coat pocket, or, in this case, behind an unseen window high above the street. However observational, the footage does not appear to be official documentation. It is true that the color indicates that it was taken by someone of privilege, and because it was inside the ghetto, it was likely to have been a German. Nevertheless, it shares many attributes with other clandestine, and thus very ambiguous, images. To relieve us of the burden of interpretation, the voice-over of The Third Reich in Colour tells...

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