Filming the Camps

John Ford, Samuel Fuller, George Stevens:
From Hollywood to Nuremberg

Exhibition:  March 10 – August 31, 2010

Sixty-five years ago, the world was to discover the films shot by the Allies in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. We  know very little of the authors of the footage which has come down over the years and even less about how the footage was shot.
The Memorial has chosen to present the careers of three such filmmakers from Hollywood: John Ford, Samuel Fuller, and George Stevens. The exhibition shows how the violence of the Second World War and the exposure to the victims of Nazi atrocities caused a complete upheaval in their lives and careers.

Thanks to the cooperation of The Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences and the Lilly Library (University of Bloomington, Indiana), and the participation of Christa Fuller, George Stevens Jr. and Jerry Rudes, for the first time in France the Memorial is presenting a series of often unpublished archives, films, and photographs which enable today’s generations to observe, the first-hand, day by day experience of these filmmakers.

Accompanying the exhibition:
- The catalog, published by the Mémorial de la Shoah.
- A series of screenings from March 10 - 21, of the footage showing the discovery of the camps by the filmmakers presented in the exhibition.
- A series of films starting May 2010, which show the relationship between Hollywood and the Holocaust including the films produced for cinema and television from 1933 to the present day.

Exhibition Curator:
Christian Delage, historian, professor researcher at the University Paris VIII and the ‘École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales’ (EHESS).

General Coordination:
Sophie Nagiscarde, in charge of cultural activities and Marie-Édith Agostini, exhibition coordinator, Mémorial de la Shoah.

Three Filmmakers from Hollywood

George Stevens is famous for comedies and his direction of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rodgers couple. In 1943, he signed up as a Major in the Signal Corps of the American Army, in charge of filming ally action during the war. He covered the North African campaign then went to London where General Eisenhower ordered him to recruit a crew of 45 people, the Special Coverage Unit (Specou), to prepare to film the Normandy D-Day. Specou included writers such as Ivan Moffat, William Saroyan and Irwin Shaw as well as the cameramen (Dick Hoar, Ken Marthey, William Mellor, Jack Muth), a sound engineer from Columbia (Bill Hamilton) and Hal Roach’s  Assistant Director, Holly Morse. Specou filmed the liberation of Dachau Camp amongst others.

Samuel Fuller was known for his talent as a crime reporter in the tabloid press then as a scriptwriter before he joined the first infantry division of the American Army in 1942, the renowned ‘Big Red One’. He filmed the liberation of the Falkenau camp.
At the beginning of the 30’s, John Ford, a member of the Navy reserve at the time, set up a unit of cameramen who could intervene if need be. In 1939, the photographic unit of the 11th Naval Section became operational.

In the summer of 1941, John Ford announced that he had trained a crew of about 60 technicians. General Donovan, information coordinator then Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the central intelligence agency during the Second World War and precursor of the CIA, called Ford in to have him transform the Naval unit into the Field Photographic Branch (FPB) and appointed him director. The FPB was in charge of filming a documentary entitled the Nazi Concentration Camps (1945), which was first viewed in the USA before being used as evidence of Nazi crimes before the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. The FPB was also entrusted with the filming of the Nuremberg trial.

A Team of Professionals Given a Precise Mission
The exhibition focuses on the Dachau and Falkenau camps and enables the public to understand the particular working conditions of the American cameramen. The teams set up by John Ford and George Stevens included professionally recognized, experienced cameramen specially trained for the task. The FPB work orders (an exceptional document presented for the first time in France) show how the cameramen who were to be faced with Nazi crimes were to follow precise instructions in recording the events they were about to witness. The question of the validation of the footage as evidence in the upcoming trial was already raised. The cameramen were to draft a commentary each day of filming either in the form of a caption sheet, or in a more elaborate master caption story. In the weekly photographic report, one of the Specou officers, most often George Stevens himself drafted a summary of the week’s filming. For the first time the exhibition presents a selection of footage in chronological order accompanied by a facsimile of the cameramen’s commentary in overlay.

Three actors
Mathieu Amalric, Jean-François Stévenin and Jean-Louis Trintignant have recorded the voiceover of the commentary especially for the exhibition.
Alongside the films, the exhibition includes still shots taken by Stevens’ cameramen of the Dachau train containing corpses and others by Stevens himself. Stevens had in fact taken a 16mm camera and Kodachrome color film along with him. For his personal records, he took pictures of his own cameramen at work. He also added a subjective commentary to the official reports which were kept in his private collection until his son donated these documents to the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Thus the exhibition presents the professional black and white films and still shots alongside the color photos from Stevens’ private collection.

From Documentary to Fiction
In juxtaposition to this initial parallel vision, a mirroring interplay of documentaries and fiction films by Stevens and Fuller is presented. After having filmed certain war events on-site, live, how does one go about turning them into a documentary or fiction film? The case of Fuller, who filmed the liberation of the Falkenau camp in 1945, is a good illustration of this dilemma. In the 1959 film Verboten! Fuller shows the screening of Stevens’ footage of the Dachau camp liberation, as edited by Ford’s crew, before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Then in the film The Big Red One, made in 1980, he uses a sequence in Falkenau, which looks very different from the one he shot himself in 1945. The overlap and gaps between fiction and documentary reveal the ethics of these filmmakers and the historical awareness that guided them. In the 1980’s Emil Weiss showed Samuel Fuller, of Jewish Russo-polish origins, his footage of Falkenau; Fuller then gave his own personal commentary, both precise and powerful.

In an original scenic interplay, the exhibition combines the authentic caption sheets and reports alongside the footage, the later testimony of the filmmakers, their fiction films and the legal prescriptions regarding the qualification and the projection of footage and photographs as evidence before the Nuremberg Tribunal. For the first time, today’s viewers can gain greater insight into what transpired behind the scenes, before the mediation of the thoughtful and after-the-fact editing as prepared and commented upon by the crews of John Ford, George Stevens and Samuel Fuller.