(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Radu Jude is better known as feature film director (Aferim!, Scarred Hearts) and as director of Cristi Puius The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, but now he is behind the documentary The Dead Nation, a moving 83 minute course in Romanian pre-war history.
Countdown to death. Those who do not know the history of Romania will experience the extermination of Romanian Jews through a collage of historical photographs, voices and words in Emil Dorian's diary, as a kind of meditation on the darkness contained in the human mind. More than 70 years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust is still a subject to which filmmakers and writers are constantly returning. The fact that Holocaust's horror and power has not faded from time is confirmed by films such as the recent Oscar-winning Son of Saul by the Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes. It is precisely the largely unexplored extremes of the Nazi "End Solution" – as the enthusiastic participation in genocide among various nations joined the Axis powers – that makes documentary films such as Jude so fascinating.
The film starts with the sound of a steam locomotive blending into photographic references to Romania in 1933, and – like the relentless journey of the symbolic train (packed with associations to cuvettes and human destruction) – the film speeds up as the years begin to tick in a countdown to death. 1937 goes into 1938, the war is approaching.
The unexplored extremes of the Nazi "End Solution" – as the enthusiastic participation in genocide among various nations joined the Axis powers – make Jude's documentary films so fascinating.
There is a terrible warning in Dorian's diary of what awaits the Romanian Jews: “The collapse is total. People are expecting the same measures Hitler has implemented in Germany ”(with a picture of cattle standing on a snowy ground).
To change sides. If the use of animal imagery may seem a little obscure, it might be worth considering both the view that fascists of all kinds had on certain people, and the number of ways many of the victims of the purification went to death, as herdsmen. They were unable (and perhaps subconsciously unwilling) to accept the degree to which they abandoned civilized norms. Dorian, a Jewish physician, writes, for example, after being fired from the board of an insurance company, that he wishes fewer friends would "express sympathy"; or the reference to Jews threatened with loss of citizenship, as simply a "slap in the face" of a million people.
The series of images, many taken from glass and celluloid negatives that have cracked and broken over the years, underscores the feeling that this is ancient history, even though we know it is within the memory of still living people: the child king Michael (1927– 1930 and from 1940 until he abdicated on December 30, 1947) is still alive – even though he is now, as a 96-year-old, in frail health. A reference from 1938 to "our king who assures us that there will be no pogrom… but Jews could make it easier for themselves by leaving Romania", probably refers to his uncle, Prince Nicholas, who was a member of the royal family advice.
The atrocities increase and mirror what is happening in Germany: In November 1938, a few weeks after the Crystal Night, synagogues in Romania burn; a university rector is murdered. The litany of atrocities continues: "Tragic experience has taught [the Jews] that they must be scapegoats."
When the country gained a fascist government in 1939, the Romans rallied together on the new order; Jude's series of photographs of uniformed men and children raising his arm in what the journalist calls "the Roman greeting" testifies to the spread of Nazi theology. One can only think of how quickly such images became a deadly burden when the Red Army swept through Romania a few years later, and the country changed sides and joined the Allies.
But for many Romanian Jews, the Red Army arrived late. In September 1939, Dorian writes in her journal that “death is nearing. People thought it was okay to kill in China – it was so far away. "
Lurking hat. Staccato and merciless, words and pictures, pictures and words – the war is underway. The map of Europe is being redrawn after Soviet demands on Romanian provinces do not elicit reactions either in Nazi Germany or fascist Italy. The Jews were blamed for the national humiliation at the loss of Bukovina and Bessarabia.
The series of images that have broken and broken over the years underlines the feeling that this is ancient history, though we know it is within the memory span of living persons: the child king Michael.
Our doctor stoically records the personal consequences: the loss of his "last chance to survive", his job as a doctor at a national bank; the growing amount of assaults and random murders of Jews; the closure of Jewish schools and institutions.
Sound recordings are played – mass meetings with (fascist) legionaries; political speeches – but Jude avoids vivid images in favor of the slow series of photographs: against an image so ruined by age that the only thing visible is a cracked petri dish with traces of something virus-like, the diary's words thunder against the sounds of time: darkness in this hateful century. ”
In an early 21st-century Europe, where neo-fascist and populist movements are fueled by fears created by the massive influx of refugees from North Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan over the past few years, the ancient dark and hated lies deep in stones that are not facing. Jude's film reminds us of the risks of populism: If it were so easy to turn from talking about the "Bolshevik poison" of the Russians one year to "our great neighbor, the Soviet
the Union »next, what makes people think that Europe is so different today? Jude's film makes us remember that the lessons of the Holocaust can be repeated over and over again.
