The Photographer of Mauthausen (TPOM), available on Netflix, is a Spanish film directed by Mar Targarona. The film is written by Roger Danès and Alfred Pérez Fargas.
It is based on the true story of Francesc Boix (Mario Casas), a left-wing Catalan militant held as a prisoner at the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. A combination of pluck and intelligence, along with his photographic skills, helped Boix survive one of the deadliest slave-labor camps of the Nazis. While forced to work in the camp’s photographic lab under orders from SS officer Paul Ricken (Richard Van Weyden), Boix eventually discovered photographic evidence of the Nazi atrocities towards its prisoners. Boix then decided to make it his mission to present this evidence before the world.
“TPOM” is the incredible story of Boix’s unwavering and fearless attempts to preserve film negatives and bring Nazi war atrocities at the camp to the world as evidence of its crimes against humanity.
Mauthausen-Gusen and its subcamps formed one of the largest slave-labor complexes in German-controlled Europe. It was the hub of a large group of German concentration camps in Upper Austria, roughly 20 kilometers east of the city of Linz, on the river Danube. The complex had been built within months of Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, and over the next seven years, almost half of the 200,000 prisoners who passed through Mauthausen were killed there.
Many Spaniards who fled to France following the victory of fascist forces in the Spanish civil war (1936-39) were captured by German forces after the fall of France in 1940 or they were handed over to the Third Reich by the French Vichy authorities.
Boix (born in 1920), joined the French Army, was captured by Germans and sent to Mauthausen in 1941, where he remained until its liberation in May 1945. Because of his reputation as a topmost amateur photographer, he became an assistant in the photo laboratory to SS officer Paul Ricken who was the camp photographer. The Nazis were painstaking in their photographic documentation of day-to-day life in all of the camps, including showing the executions of prisoners along with recording important visits to Mauthausen by Nazi officials as Heinrich Himmler and Albert Speer.
In the course of Boix’s internment, according to” “TPOM, Boix was able to hide and smuggle out of the camp over 2,000 negatives documenting the systematic horror and war crimes committed by the Nazi SS. These photo negatives also played a crucial role in prosecuting certain high-ranking officers at the Nuremberg trials.
“TPOM opens to a montage of distorted images with restrained hues of horrors that gradually come into focus. The male prisoners of Mauthausen are shown to be a wide distribution of ages all of whom are in various states of poor health. As new prisoners enter the camp, you witness that their possessions are confiscated, they are undressed, and their heads shaved. They are then marched out into the cold where they are forced to stand naked, freezing in formation.
SS officer Ricken positions his camera and methodically photographs these freezing prisoners. The supreme commandant of Mauthausen, Franz Ziereis (Stefan Weinert), then arrives to look over the new prisoners. The old, the maimed and the frail are pulled out of formation and directed to a van to be driven away. The van was a Zyklon b gas truck.
You then see a hysterical young boy named Anselmo (Adrià Salazar) watching his father being driven away in one of these trucks but he is too young or naïve to understand the final fate of his father. In the scene you see the devastated Anselmo’s father motion to his son to remain still.
The Mauthausen labor camp forced prisoners to mine stone from local quarries to make Nazi war memorials. Most of these laborers were worked to death in these quarries. The Kapos kept the prisons in line and were in many cases as or more brutal than the SS guards. (a Kapo or prisoner functionary was a special type of prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Kapos were chosen by the Schutzstaffel (SS) camp guards to help run the concentrations camps)
Finally, as the film continues, we are introduced to Boix as he prepares his camera lens for a headshot photo of Anselmo wearing his prison uniform. He is then seen consoling the young boy, assuring him his father will be safe at the infirmary at the Gusen camp. When Anselmo leaves, Valbuena (Alain Hernández), head assistant in the photographic laboratory, chides Boix for lying to the boy.
The film progresses to depict a montage of horrific incidents that encompass the four years of captivity for Boix. There are also the poignant struggles of other prisoners trying desperately to survive in the most perilous of situations. All of them are continually brutally harassed while attempting to endure in an environment without humanitarian rules or protocols. There was zero opportunity to provide the basic human requirement of emotional escape from fear or the certitude of imminent violence and death.
What is gripping and thought-provoking is the very first exchange between Boix and Ricken which sets into motion the film’s plot development. They are discussing the argument about the nature of art and its objectivity. This dialogue is juxtaposed with human atrocities in plain sight all around them. In the abstract this discussion works, but in the narrative of reality it is difficult concept to consider.
After Boix explains to Ricken how he became a photographer, Ricken looks over his work and says, “You can make it better. You must learn to paint with light.” Boix replies, “That’s cheating.” Ricken counters “that art, like the experience of reality, is purely subjective and a matter of interpretation.”
We then witness the photos showing the cover-up of senseless execution killings committed by SS officers that are then restaged and re-photographed as escapes from the camp for the official Third Reich records.
In a particularly gruesome scene, Boix and Ricken travel by car to the outskirts of the camp. There they find several frozen corpses lying in the snow. They were allegedly shot attempting to escape. While Boix sets up the camera lights and positions the bodies, he whispers to Fonesca (Eduard Buch), another prisoner who oversees the Photo Lab Identification Services, that these men were simply executed and then dumped in the snow. The sole purpose of this photo shoot was to again create a record that no one escapes Mauthausen. One of the dead is Anselmo’s father.
While Boix is working in the photo lab, he discovers a file filled with war crime negatives. Scrutinizing these, he discovers that they are “negatives” of piles of bodies lying one upon another. Disturbed by his findings and what he sees on a daily basis of the Nazis’ systematic mass killings, he instinctively decides that he must work to create evidence of these atrocities. So, he begins to collect and hide the negatives in the back of a drawer in a filing cabinet and in other secret areas. Eventually Boix elicits help from other camp prisoners, distributing the negatives as widely as possible. The hope is someone will survive the camp and use the negatives to bring the atrocities happening there to the world.
In one of the film’s transitional moments, Boix meets with other prisoners in the back of one of the barracks. They are secretively listening to a war broadcast on amateur radio that has been stored under the barrack floor boards. They find out that the Germans have lost the Battle of Stalingrad (early February 1943). Though cautiously elated by the magnitude of the news, the men also learn that Ziereis (the camp commandant) because of the massive losses at Stalingrad has ordered the destruction of all negatives and prints in the photo lab. Ziereis knows that the devastating loss means the war is quickly turning against Germany.
Boix seizes on this revelation and convinces more of his comrades to preserve this photo evidence; otherwise; he says, “no one will ever believe the horrors the Nazi have committed at Mauthausen.” It is at this point that the film’s pacing begins to shift into a higher gear creating a sense of purposeful urgency among the prisoners. There is now a directed effort by these men working in concert to hide and smuggle out as many of these photographs however and wherever possible.
One bold attempt to smuggle out the negatives involved the escape of a prisoner. Desperate and determined to find the escapee the SS are unsuccessful and drastic punishment ensues. The prisoners are turned out of the barracks and lined up. Ziereis, blaring into a microphone, berates and threatens them about any future escape attempts. Parodying an earlier moment when the Spanish prisoners staged a variety show to divert the guards’ attention during the escape. The brutal Nazi Commandant forces the prisoners to watch a procession of musicians leading a tortured comrade toward makeshift gallows.
Ricken stands ready with his camera to capture the moment. A noose is placed around the prisoner’s neck, and the stool he is standing on is kicked out from under him. As he begins to swing, the rope breaks and he falls to the ground, gasping. Ziereis, visibly irritated, has the band resume playing. The Kapos force the prisoner up, place a sturdier noose around his neck and the repeat the killing attempt. This time it is successful.
Then, in a touching, poignant but painful series of moments, the camera pans over the shoulder of the swaying man at the faces of more than 30 prisoners who march one by one past their colleague, each staring at him with anguish and pain.
No more spoilers here…but if you have made it this far, you will want to know and see how this film ends. It will be well worth it.
First a caution: “TPOM” has strong scenes of shocking violence. It obviously includes interior concentration camp scenes with short blast of collective dead body shots. And certainly, it is not suitable for audiences under 17.
Now you may be wondering why I have chosen to not only watch this film but to do extensive research and provide this review. First: “TPOM” is in no way your patterned or characteristic Holocaust Concentration Camp film. The film is seen through the eyes of a prisoner’s camera lens, providing an interesting and true view of what took place at Mauthausen over a period of years.
So, you may ask why l, or in fact you, would want to see this movie? The film covers a perverse paradox in terms of art vs objectivity. How can Nazi SS photographer Paul Ricken use crimes against humanity as his art canvas?
This premise alone is an interesting starting point for me to begin my involvement with this movie. Note: Please play the movie trailer before proceeding ahead to watch the film.
Once I was engrossed in the film, it was the closest thing I have witnessed to date of what it was like to experience being in a concentration camp.
Next point: My Mother. of blessed memory, was a survivor of Auschwitz who never spoke about her experiences to us. I am on a life quest to educate myself about what she had gone through. Her unique set of camp experiences and how she came to be the person whom I knew after this unthinkable experience, is a key reason for me to watch and review these Holocaust-themed movies.
This film also provides lots of insight into the disturbing world of systemic anti-Semitism, and the pathetic breed of individuals who carried out the Holocaust. It clearly gave me a better view of a what Mom had gone through being in the Auschwitz camp.
If you are faint of heart and are negatively affected by these Holocaust experiences, I would stay away from this movie. However, if you would like to embrace am unsung hero of the Holocaust who died shortly after liberation when he was only 30, then this movie should be watched. Of course, I would welcome hearing your thoughts about this film/
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Jeffery Giesener, former CEO of SourceMob, has both public and private company experience. Today, retired and enjoying life in San Diego, he’s a freelance writer who has a passion for both cinema and baking his Mom’s (OBM) European recipes. This column is sponsored by Judi Gottschalk in memory of her parents, Agathe and Berek Ehrenfried.
Republished from San Diego Jewish World