Images of the World and the Inscription of War underlines the troubling proximity between acts of conservation and acts of destruction, the relationship between the violence of war and the technologies of recording and reconnaissance, the instability of meaning at work in the image ...[The film] therefore forcefully underlines the necessary "collusion of image and text in the writing of history." The knowledge constituted by eyewitness accounts permits us to decode elements hidden in the image, to recognize what was inscribed there, but neither interpreted nor even seen at the time it was recorded. The conjunction of seeing and knowing thus allows us to recover the unthought of the photograph at the moment of its making. This reading appears as the product of an encounter between historical knowledge, the regime of memory, the symbolic and social demands that condition the exhumation of photographs, the questions addressed to them, the ways of decoding them.

Fritz Hippler recalls the instructions given to him by Goebbels while filming in Lodz in 1940: 'Film everything you see: the life and the crowds in the streets; the commerce and trade, the rituals in the synagogue, crime, none of this should be forgotten. It has to be captured in its original state.'

...These remarks attributed to Goebbels reveal, above all, the conjunction between the act of archiving and disappearance that prefigures the tragic encounter between putting-in-an-image and putting-to-death. From 1942, in fact, filming was continued and increased in the Polish ghettos. The Nazis filmed those that they were going to kill, documenting them because they were going to kill them.

In Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Farocki juxtaposes photographs from diverse sources in order to decode the traces of the event inscribed in the pictures while simultaneously taking the measure of what is not immediately represented. In Respite, however, he starts with a single source in order to evoke memory-images. The sequences of Westerbork thus become palimpsest images, which summon to the surface other image-strata, which recall the memory and history of cinema. Accordingly, the black intertitle cards play the role of crystallizers of memory and facilitators of vision, while simultaneously providing a space for absent images.

There is another meaning of the title Respite that refers to the notion of latency, to the passing and the work of time, the time that mirrors the forgotten scenes of life in the camp and that extends to the present. In this sense, the force of Farocki's film depends on the contextualization of these shots within the mechanisms of propaganda as well as the confidence he places in their autonomous power. Detached from the intentions of the film, the luminous faces of the persecuted appear before us as revenant images. This spectral effect allows an emotion to surge forth that assures the posthumous victory of these captive men, women and children placed in front of the camera at the whim of their jailor, since time can foil the designs of the conquerors, and the image, as Chris Marker observed, has the power to transform the dead into something eternal.

In contrast to the aerial shots of the tourist sites, the camera takes a position low to the ground to photograph the favela from the base of the hill to the top. This angle enables dos Santos to give audiences a better sense of the size and steepness of the hill as well as the closeness and poverty of the wooden shacks, which lack even running water. We see a boy walking up the hill with a can of water on his head and several others making their way down narrow paths and onto the paved streets filled with marketplaces, cafés, and palm trees. These few shots make clear that the favela is quite close to the city; but life in the metropole is so much richer that it seems like another planet.

Between and within sections, characters' thoughts and moods often undergo swift, radical changes, revealing their curiosity about language and undermining certain stereotypical notions about "primitives" derived from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. In fact, Ramos's novel is as much or more concerned with the "human and contradictory" language and consciousness of the retirante (peasant migrant) as it is with the brutal landowning system of the Northeast.

...Dos Santos's film dramatizes this scene in its entirety [an episode in which the oldest son struggles with his mother's explanation of the concept of inferno], but it somewhat downplays the boy's curiosity about the words and his desire to understand what he does not know, giving greater emphasis to the ironic relationship between the word 'hell' and the boy's immediate surroundings.

Viewed in these terms, dos Santos's film is less interested in distorting a canonical text than in revealing what that text omits. Its documentary-like or "anthropological" style directly participates in an effort of reinterpretation by providing the viewer with a simulation of what has been lost, not just in time but also through the selective cultural process. Dos Santos's solidarity with the Tupinambá can therefore be described as an ideological position in powerful contrast with the interests and values of the dominant class in Brazil, which has always identified with Europeans, especially the French.

Although dos Santos had long been aware of religious practices in the favela, his approach in his earliest films was strictly Marxist, focusing on social class and race while implicitly dismissing religion as an opiate of the masses. O amuleto de Ogum makes clear not only the centrality of religion in the lives of the poor but also the ways in which umbanda reinforces class solidarity and gives a kind of power to individuals who are caught in a violent and corrupt world.

The actor's search through the archive is also, of course, a fictional device that allows dos Santos to show brief clips, most of them in pristine condition, of wonderfully evocative black-and-white films of the studio era. By this means he pays tribute to a generation of directors, cinematographers, and stars who became internationally famous largely because of their work in melodramas. Although the content of these films had little to do with the social reality of the moviegoing public, the Mexican melodramas were among the highest-quality films made in Latin America. In effect, dos Santos who began his career as a neorealist and a symbol of the Latin American New Wave, takes a revisionary approach to a genre that, like the chanchada [musical comedies], was often criticized by the Left because of its association with Hollywood.