Super 8 film. 1972 Braun Nizo S2. Kodak 50D. Color. 4 min 25 sec. 2025
Marie & The Towers is part of an ongoing film investigation into Viennese painter Marie Rosenthal’s looted works. Drawing from Nazi records housed in Vienna University’s Jewish Studies Library, as well as internet archives, the film constructs a semi-imagined history of one of Marie’s paintings: a portrait of her daughters.
Marie is my great-great-aunt, which is how I know her story. This familial connection has given me access to some of her records at Vienna University, though I am not in contact with any of her living relatives. As such, I am exploring alternative strategies to investigate her life and work—methods that reflect the kind of familial distance common in the diaspora.
The formal technique of the film is Super 8 footage of the remains of Nazi Flak Towers in Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna. These towers were built during WWII primarily for military defense against Allied air raids. However, due to their size and structural integrity, they served additional wartime purposes: functioning as shelters, hospitals, maternity wards, animal experimentation labs, and at times, storage sites for looted artworks.
Because of their large guns and communications capabilities, the Flak Towers became bombing targets. As the war neared its end and Nazi defeat became certain, many of their functions—art storage included—came to an end.
I know for certain that a few of Marie’s paintings survived the war, including the portrait of her daughters, but I know little else about the rest of her work. This short film uses the history and function of the Flak Towers, a site where there exists accessible knowledge, to tell the story of one Jewish painter, and one of her paintings.
Super 8, a format often associated with nostalgia in contemporary filmmaking, is here repurposed. Rather than using it to capture family memories, I use it to document Nazi war relics. In this way, nostalgia is inverted—the medium distorts and complicates sentimental feelings rather than confirming them. By focusing solely on the Nazi structures, the film also draws attention to what is absent: Marie’s lost works, and Marie herself.
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