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What has happened to Konrad Theodor Preuss's collection? Perhaps his collection is nothing more than an accumulation of dead and distant objects, a collection of traditions and popular rumours. No wonder it is called a crime scene. Any collection of materials alters the meaning of things, from relics to scraps and vice versa.Their accumulation carries with it a certain violence that consists of turning objects into archaeological objects. Thus creating sedimentary layers, linear successions, detachments, and a rupture between the versions of the past and those of the present. Archival film, found and recreated, filled with plastic gestures and encounters. Collecting Materials is a palimpsest of times and documents, a freehand ethnography, an inventory of natural wonders.
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When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".
