About the film

“Respite” consists of silent black-and-white film shot at Westerbork, a Dutch refugee camp established in 1939 for Jews fleeing Germany. In 1942, after the occupation of the Netherlands, its function was reversed by the Nazis and it became a “transit camp”. In 1944, the camp commander commissioned a film, shot by a photographer, Rudolph Breslauer. “By exhuming the scattered fragments and traces of the phantom film (intertitle cards, ideas for the scenario, graphic elements), Harun Farocki inscribes the Dutch footage within the genre of the corporate film. It was meant to highlight the economic efficiency of the camp at the very moment its existence seemed threatened: at the time of filming, as the majority of Jews from the Netherlands had already been deported, Westerbork was converted into a labour camp with the approval of the commandant who feared its closure and was afraid of being transferred to another theatre of operations. In this respect, one of the revelations of “Respite” concerns the discovery of a camp logo consisting of a factory surmounted by a smoking chimney.