Filming the war: the Soviets and the Holocaust (1941–1946) exhibition and catalog

From 1941 to 1945, because of the geographical distribution, hundreds of hours of film have been shot by Soviet camera operators on the eastern front. Aimed to reveal to a worldwide audience nazis’ barbarity and the spectrum of atrocities they committed, these images show the opening of the mass graves and the traces of mass executions in Eastern Europe (Babi Yar, Rostov, Krasnodar, Kertch…), the liberation of the concentration and extermination camps (Klooga, Majdanek, Auschwitz…), as well as the numerous trials and executions following on the Liberation. Only the Soviets were able to film evidence of the Holocaust, in all of its dimensions: magnitude, systemization and the variety of ways of inflicting death. How do this images have been shot, edited and screened in USSR during the war? What can these mostly unknown films tell us about the Holocaust? [exhibition website]

Scenographer David Lebreton conceived the space with the cinema at the heart of the exhibition. The screen, as a vector of war images, is the element from which the scenography is constructed.

Emmanuel Labard, in charge of the exhibition graphic design, asked type designer Yoann Minet to give life to one of his ideas: a typeface with regular proportions for lowercases but with condensed capitals. This gave birth to the first weight of Stratos that Labard used throughout all the exhibition as the only typeface. Stratos would eventually become a much richer type family distributed under the Production Type imprint.

For the exhibition catalog that Labard designed with Alexandre Essayie (before he co-founded Maison Solide), Stratos is still the main face but now is complemented with Minotaur.