American Cinematographer - February 1990 - 53

film
inside
the
barracks.
Auschwitz has the two story, rec¬

Opposite

page:
Willem Dafoe

ognizable army-style barracks,

plays a Greek

because it was originally built as an

boxer interned at
Auschwitz. Left:

army camp. Birkenau, which is
about two kilometers away, was
the biggest purpose-built death

Fights were
staged for the

camp the SS constructed. Although
Auschwitz became a death camp,
it's a tiny camp compared to Birke¬
nau,

amusement of the

SS in their smoky
camp quarters.
Below left: Clark

which has the brick single¬

story bungalows, row after row
after row, and that's where we
filmed most of our interiors.
"We also filmed in the

Gestapo headquarters and the in¬
famous Cell Block 11, which is a
national shrine to the Poles be¬
cause of the number of
people who
died there. The finale of the film
takes place there. Principal photog¬

raphy lasted 72 days, over a 12 or
13 week schedule, shooting six
days a week, including a week in
Israel."

Triumph of the Spirit,
which stars Willem Dafoe, Edward

James Olmos and Robert Loggia, is
based on the true story of Salamo
Arouch. In 1943, the Greek Jew had

just captured the middleweight

boxing championship of the Bal¬
kans when the Germans thun¬
dered through Thessalonica.
Arouch and his family found
themselves at Birkenau. Over the
next two

years more

than 200

bouts, most against far weaker
opponents, were staged for the
amusement of the SS guards. The
brutal efficiency of the camp meant
that defeated boxers, usually too
weak to work, went to the gas
chambers.
Arouch's dilemma, fight¬

"Working in a concentra¬
the scene of such hor¬

tion camp,

affected us when we first went
there, and it continued to affect
us," he recalls. "The strangest
ror,

ing for his life at the expense of
others, is paralleled throughout
the family's camp experience in
Triumph. The necessity of survival

thing in the world was knowing
that when you left your hotel room
in the morning, you were going to

survival which becomes in a
collaboration - and the
moral decrepitude needed for that

work in Auschwitz-Birkenau. A
odd kind of contradiction started

-

sense a

survival, is the chilling personal
battle that lies at the heart of the
film.
"It's not a
a

didactic lecture

polemic, it's not
on

the evils of

Nazism, although that of course is
self-evident in every

frame of the

film," says Clark. "In fact, I think
of the

dangers might be that
it's too easy to turn Nazis into cli¬
ches. In many films there is a ter¬
rible tendency to simplify by
making something all good or all
one

to

meaning, since the scale and the
systematic nature in which this
whole operation was carried out
goes far beyond simplistic notions
of good versus evil.
"If anything, it might
make people want to understand
the conditions that created fascism.
We must understand

or come

terms with how fascism

scale

came

on

to

that

about, do whatever is

bad, and I think in the context of

necessary to ensure that that
would never happen again. The
film in a sense is a step in that di¬

this sort of complex

rection,

historical situ¬

ation, that just doesn't have much

so

that it's not just a holo¬

caust remembrance.

February 1990

emerge. On one hand, Birkenau
and Auschwitz became a movie set
for us - you had to get on with the
work at hand. On the other hand,
you could never, ever be unaware
of what happened there.
"For example, in the arri¬
val scenes, when the prisoners
come into the
camp by rail, we
used the same railway sidings, the
exact boxcars that were used then.

Nothing was faked. The train en¬
gine was an authentic engine actu¬
ally used for that purpose. So when
we were
filming, it was uncannily
realistic, and very disconcerting.
Even when my

American

procedural

Cinematographer

preoc-

51
American Cinematographer - February 1990

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