Review of The Photographer of Mauthausen

 

A not entirely satisfactory film about Spanish Republican Francisco Boix, who escaped the fall of Spain to France where he was interned, joined the French Foreign Legion and ended up in a Nazi concentration camp (Mauthausen) along with thousands of other Spanish Republicans - the Francoist regime cancelled their citizenship so that they were officially stateless.

I first heard about Boix during a Civil War walking tour of Barcelona given by Nick Lloyd (do it if you get a chance) and was very moved by the story, so I was keen to see the film even though I generally avoid Holocaust movies. This film reminded me why - it's very hard to get the tone right, and this had lots of touches that I didn't like...slushy music, thriller-type tropes, and a sometimes confusing plot. What was the trick by which Communists in the camp were switching already-dead prisoners for resistance fighters marked for execution? I didn't understand it from the film. The real Boix hid photographic evidence from the camp...in the film he just seems to shove it behind cupboards in the hope that it won't be found.

I note in passing that the character of Paul Ricken, one of the SS officers in the camp, is made more sympathetic than history suggests...

The moment in which the camp is liberated can't but be effective, and the Spanish prisoners produce a Republican flag to greet their liberators. This is all the more effective because we know that their hopes that the fight against Franco will be recognised as part of the greater anti-Fascist war are about to be dashed. Right at the end we see that many of the shots in the film are reconstructions of the actual photos.

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast and (Ruth's) smartphone.