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Holocaust cinema: why film-makers are revisiting a never-to-be-forgotten hell Holocaust cinema: why film-makers are revisiting a never-to-be-forgotten hell
(about 17 hours later)
“No one could bear to look at these things without losing their sanity,” said WG Sebald, just before he died in 2001: he was talking about the Holocaust, and specifically the numerous acts of bestial persecution visited on the Nazi’s unfortunate victims. This has been a preoccupation of film-makers too, ever since the first newsreels emerged from concentration camps after their liberation. The desire to show, to tell, to educate, comes up against decency, taste and revulsion. What purpose, exactly, is served by documenting and/or recreating unwatchably violent and horrible images: hapless civilians murdered in their millions; shot, beaten, starved and tortured in greater numbers than ever believed possible; an entire national civilisation that prided itself on its sophistication undergoing the most spectacular moral breakdown in history. At what point do film-makers take responsibility for the trauma their images inflict, even if they are simply reflecting actual events?“No one could bear to look at these things without losing their sanity,” said WG Sebald, just before he died in 2001: he was talking about the Holocaust, and specifically the numerous acts of bestial persecution visited on the Nazi’s unfortunate victims. This has been a preoccupation of film-makers too, ever since the first newsreels emerged from concentration camps after their liberation. The desire to show, to tell, to educate, comes up against decency, taste and revulsion. What purpose, exactly, is served by documenting and/or recreating unwatchably violent and horrible images: hapless civilians murdered in their millions; shot, beaten, starved and tortured in greater numbers than ever believed possible; an entire national civilisation that prided itself on its sophistication undergoing the most spectacular moral breakdown in history. At what point do film-makers take responsibility for the trauma their images inflict, even if they are simply reflecting actual events?
The story behind the recently completed German Concentration Camps Factual Survey film attests to that: it was compiled from footage sent to London in 1945 by combat film units, as Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald were liberated: more was acquired from the Soviet film crews present at the death camps further east, Auschwitz and Treblinka. At some point the project – which briefly involved Alfred Hitchcock as a consultant – was abandoned, for no clear reason. The best guess is that its stated aim – to confront the surviving German population with atrocities carried out in their name, and partly in their midst – was neither effective or expedient, as the allies sought to rebuild and reorganise in the already-burgeoning cold war with the USSR. But even at 70 years distance, the images it contains are appalling. The enormous mounds of emaciated corpses, tipped into giant burial pits; crowds of starving, disease-ridden survivors barely clinging to life; the unutterably gruesome remains of a man who had attempted to dig his way out under the wall of a burning building, only to be shot by soldiers waiting on the other side. The story behind the recently completed German Concentration Camps Factual Survey film attests to that: it was compiled from footage sent to London in 1945 by combat film units, as Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald were liberated: more was acquired from the Soviet film crews present at the death camps further east, Auschwitz and Treblinka. At some point the project – which briefly involved Alfred Hitchcock as a consultant – was abandoned, for no clear reason. The best guess is that its stated aim – to confront the surviving German population with atrocities carried out in their name, and partly in their midst – was neither effective nor expedient, as the allies sought to rebuild and reorganise in the already-burgeoning cold war with the USSR. But even at 70 years distance, the images it contains are appalling. The enormous mounds of emaciated corpses, tipped into giant burial pits; crowds of starving, disease-ridden survivors barely clinging to life; the unutterably gruesome remains of a man who had attempted to dig his way out under the wall of a burning building, only to be shot by soldiers waiting on the other side.
The sheer scale of the events chronicled in Factual Survey is what makes it so staggering. Despite – or perhaps because of – the unending stream of atrocity footage that has emerged in the digital era, the obsessive magnitude of the Holocaust still defies belief. It could also be part of the reason why Holocaust-themed cinema has unexpectedly returned to cultural prominence; much has been said about it, but the subject is so vast, so awful, that there is always more. In one sense, cinema is still grappling with depicting the realities of mass extermination: one of the main reasons the Hungarian film Son of Saul, which premiered at the Cannes film festival, is so extraordinary is that it has found a way – via unrelenting closeups of the face of its lead character, Saul, one of the Sonderkommando team charged with shepherding prisoners into the gas chambers, and cleaning up afterwards – to take its drama into the heart of the Auschwitz darkness, without directly portraying its horrors. They are there, for sure; killings, selections, dissections – all the panoply of Nazi brutalities are present, but are glimpsed only in the corners of the frame, suggested in out-of-focus blurs, or by hideous noises off screen.The sheer scale of the events chronicled in Factual Survey is what makes it so staggering. Despite – or perhaps because of – the unending stream of atrocity footage that has emerged in the digital era, the obsessive magnitude of the Holocaust still defies belief. It could also be part of the reason why Holocaust-themed cinema has unexpectedly returned to cultural prominence; much has been said about it, but the subject is so vast, so awful, that there is always more. In one sense, cinema is still grappling with depicting the realities of mass extermination: one of the main reasons the Hungarian film Son of Saul, which premiered at the Cannes film festival, is so extraordinary is that it has found a way – via unrelenting closeups of the face of its lead character, Saul, one of the Sonderkommando team charged with shepherding prisoners into the gas chambers, and cleaning up afterwards – to take its drama into the heart of the Auschwitz darkness, without directly portraying its horrors. They are there, for sure; killings, selections, dissections – all the panoply of Nazi brutalities are present, but are glimpsed only in the corners of the frame, suggested in out-of-focus blurs, or by hideous noises off screen.
Related: Son of Saul star: ‘God was holding the hand of every Jew in the gas chamber’Related: Son of Saul star: ‘God was holding the hand of every Jew in the gas chamber’
In the brilliance of its cinematic ideas, Son of Saul has achieved something I have never seen before: an extended, entirely plausible, recreation of the mechanics of extermination inside a major Nazi death camp. This, notably, is something Steven Spielberg turned away from in Schindler’s List: though there are copious scenes of brutality – and for all the criticism, they do have basis in fact – Schindler’s List largely concentrated on the activities of Amon Goeth in the Płaszów slave labour camp in Kraków, which – and these things are relative – was not of the same order as the mass organised killings that happened in the big extermination camps. Schindler’s List only briefly steps over the threshold of Auschwitz when a train transport is misrouted; but out it comes again. In Schindler’s List, Auschwitz is an unknowable nightmare; Son of Saul, in contrast, has made it knowable.In the brilliance of its cinematic ideas, Son of Saul has achieved something I have never seen before: an extended, entirely plausible, recreation of the mechanics of extermination inside a major Nazi death camp. This, notably, is something Steven Spielberg turned away from in Schindler’s List: though there are copious scenes of brutality – and for all the criticism, they do have basis in fact – Schindler’s List largely concentrated on the activities of Amon Goeth in the Płaszów slave labour camp in Kraków, which – and these things are relative – was not of the same order as the mass organised killings that happened in the big extermination camps. Schindler’s List only briefly steps over the threshold of Auschwitz when a train transport is misrouted; but out it comes again. In Schindler’s List, Auschwitz is an unknowable nightmare; Son of Saul, in contrast, has made it knowable.
Son of Saul’s success in Cannes (where it was awarded the runner-up Grand Prix, behind Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan) has triggered a definite perking up of industry interest in the theme – most recently, a projected adaptation of Viktor Frankl’s Auschwitz memoir Man’s Search for Meaning. The Holocaust film never really went away; the last time we saw a major coalescence of such work was in the early 2000s, when Roman Polanski’s Warsaw ghetto drama The Pianist triumphed at Cannes and won Adrien Brody the best actor Oscar in Hollywood. (The era even had its own Sonderkommando film: The Grey Zone, directed by Tim Blake Nelson – somewhat hampered, if we are being honest, by its stagebound set-up and largely American cast.) More recently, films as varied as In Darkness and Ida (both from Polish directors), The Reader, Good, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Counterfeiters (from Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky) and Fateless – another brilliant Hungarian film – have all offered their various takes on the subject. And this doesn’t even include the numerous documentaries on the subject, including The Last of the Unjust, by Shoah director Claude Lanzmann, and Night Will Fall, which introduced the world to German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.Son of Saul’s success in Cannes (where it was awarded the runner-up Grand Prix, behind Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan) has triggered a definite perking up of industry interest in the theme – most recently, a projected adaptation of Viktor Frankl’s Auschwitz memoir Man’s Search for Meaning. The Holocaust film never really went away; the last time we saw a major coalescence of such work was in the early 2000s, when Roman Polanski’s Warsaw ghetto drama The Pianist triumphed at Cannes and won Adrien Brody the best actor Oscar in Hollywood. (The era even had its own Sonderkommando film: The Grey Zone, directed by Tim Blake Nelson – somewhat hampered, if we are being honest, by its stagebound set-up and largely American cast.) More recently, films as varied as In Darkness and Ida (both from Polish directors), The Reader, Good, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Counterfeiters (from Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky) and Fateless – another brilliant Hungarian film – have all offered their various takes on the subject. And this doesn’t even include the numerous documentaries on the subject, including The Last of the Unjust, by Shoah director Claude Lanzmann, and Night Will Fall, which introduced the world to German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.
But there is certainly a new urgency to, and interest in, films about the Holocaust. Other than the desire to depict and investigate in ways that previous generations of film-makers felt unable – or unequipped – to, there is a certain previously-unthinkable social currency. The kind of antisemitism that was widespread in the interwar period – which was quieted in the wake of the Holocaust – has raised its head again: most dramatically during the Charlie Hebdo massacre, during which a random kosher supermarket was attacked by Islamist gunman Amedy Coulibaly. This demonstration of the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism has meant that what had seemed a relic of an illiberal past was jolted back into full view. Cinema has certainly picked up on this: The Pianist and its like, only a decade ago, seemed like backward-looking, slightly fusty memorials to a threat that would never again materialise. Son of Saul, on the other hand, feels like a vision of a new nightmare. It’s all the more vital for that.But there is certainly a new urgency to, and interest in, films about the Holocaust. Other than the desire to depict and investigate in ways that previous generations of film-makers felt unable – or unequipped – to, there is a certain previously-unthinkable social currency. The kind of antisemitism that was widespread in the interwar period – which was quieted in the wake of the Holocaust – has raised its head again: most dramatically during the Charlie Hebdo massacre, during which a random kosher supermarket was attacked by Islamist gunman Amedy Coulibaly. This demonstration of the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism has meant that what had seemed a relic of an illiberal past was jolted back into full view. Cinema has certainly picked up on this: The Pianist and its like, only a decade ago, seemed like backward-looking, slightly fusty memorials to a threat that would never again materialise. Son of Saul, on the other hand, feels like a vision of a new nightmare. It’s all the more vital for that.