Foreword

Even if the exhibition is limited to the camps of Dachau and Falkenau (satellite of Flossenburg), it is, nevertheless, likely to make the public understand the conditions in which the cameramen had to work. To set up their teams, John Ford and George Stevens chose experienced professional cameramen or cameramen who had been specially formed for this occasion.

It is the story of these three great film directors that we want to tell in this exhibition; people whose lives have been drastically changed by the terrible acts of violence of the Second World War and their encounter with the victims of the "Nazi atrocities". To complete the impact of the pictures, Jean-François Stévenin is reading texts of John Ford and Joseph Kessel.

It is the first time that the pictures of the camp of Dachau are displayed in the chronological sequence they have been shot. They are backed up by the caption sheets filled in by the cameramen and the reports written by one of the writers Stevens had recruited. Excerpts from these stories are read by Mathieu Amalric to accompany the pictures. This whole documentary enables the spectator of today to sit in his right place, far from the cameramen whose gestures and comments are thus brought to a new life.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Lilly Library (Indiana University, Bloomington), and Christa Fuller, George Stevens Jr., and Jerry Rudes, have all proved extremely helpful; thanks to their collaboration, the Memorial can show for the first time in France, a collection for the most never seen before: a montage of library documents, films and pictures. These documents will let us share, almost day after day, a real-life experience, and this experience will be passed on, as a legacy, to the future generations.

Christian Delage, Exhibition curator.