What is the value of images as objective testimonies of a conflict? Can we believe what we see? In her new work, Sarah Vanagt turns her attention to an important chapter in recent European history: the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The artist examines obstacles to reconstructing a war that is nevertheless well documented. She has started from a simple movement of the hand – a pencil being rubbed on a sheet of paper placed over an object – and adapted this 'revelatory' rubbing process to the courtroom. This film offers a penetrating account of her exploration. Measuring the gap between the facts, the material proof of these facts, the images that represent them and their interpretation, she attempts to decipher the secret language formed by traces of war. Sharpening her eye until it becomes a microscope lens, Vanagt reveals a landscape of details inviting us to look at things differently.

A dutiful update of an illicit document showing a criminal confronted with images of the crime. One night in April 1961, Leo T. Hurwitz, the American director in charge of the multichannel recordings of the trial of the nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, secretly documented an extraordinary evening session of the Jerusalem court where the trial was proceeding. For the first time, Eichmann was confronted with images of the Holocaust. In addition to the films previously screened at the 1945–46 Nuremberg trial, Eichmann was also shown Nuit et brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1956), one of the first documentary representations of the nazi concentration and extermination system. Almost five decades later, in response to the French media-controversy surrounding Eyal Sivan’s film The Specialist, (1999) Chris Marker, assistant director on Nuit et brouillard, downloaded Hurwitz’s footage from the online Eichmann trial video archives and inserted the missing sound and counter shots from Nuit et brouillard in order to assemble a digital intervention entitled Henchman Glance.

The screening is followed by a talk with Sarah Vanagt & Tobias hering and the presentation of the book ‘Der Standpunkt der Aufnahme – Point of View: Perspectives of political film and video work’ edited by Tobias hering.