As a Film Studies academic, I often feel called upon to defend the study of something as seemingly frivolous as cinema. People hear I’m doing a PhD, and eagerly enquire as to the topic. The moment I say “Film Studies” I see the same disappointed expression, and hear the same “Oh. Well as long as you enjoy it, I suppose”. Film Studies is somehow seen as not a ‘real’ subject, lacking in practical application and therefore the refuge for students who weren’t clever enough for maths or science.
So it is somewhat vindicating for me when a film comes along that outright proves the importance of the moving image to society as a whole, and it’s even more valuable to that society when the film in question is as powerful as Night Will Fall, directed by André Singer. By turns horrifying and mesmerising, this documentary is thought-provoking but sensitive, and ever the objective tale.
In 1945, the Allies discovered the horrible reality of the Second World War in the form of the concentration camps. The possibility that such sights could be denied as wartime propaganda was a real one, yet soldiers were armed with a weapon perhaps more powerful than the machine gun; the movie camera. They filmed everything they could to provide damning evidence of what had been going on, and producer Sydney Bernstein decided to turn the footage into a documentary, the German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. With input from none other than Alfred Hitchcock, and footage from British, American, and Soviet soldiers, the documentary “would prove one day that this actually happened” – Bernstein. While the footage was used as evidence in the war crimes trials that followed the war, the documentary never saw the light of day due to the political manoeuvres of post-war Europe. The uncompleted edited footage, director’s notes and completed scripts were labelled, filed away, and forgotten about.
Until now. The Imperial War Museum have used the package to complete Bernstein’s film, which will screen at the London Film Festival. In the meantime, Night Will Fall intersperses interviews with surviving cameramen and editors, shot footage from the camps, and clips from the documentary to tell the story of its making. This is not an easy film to watch. As a horror specialist I’ve seen some incredibly gory films, but no matter how many internal organs are spattered on the floor, I know that the actors will get up and go home at the end of the day. There was no such release for the victims of the death camps, and it is difficult to connect the emaciated, lifeless forms on screen with a conception of your fellow man. The footage is not entirely new to us, having appeared in one form or another over the years, but one can only imagine the horror of seeing these sights in person back in 1945, the movie camera the only intermediary between the soldier and these visions of hell.
Yet there are touches of hope. Survivors of the camps add their stories. The Russians explained their use of the camera pan to sidestep accusations that footage had been faked. The original documentary included footage of the healing process, and for the first time I really thought about what actually happened to the survivors after the liberation of the camps. A handwritten sign proclaiming a warehouse of clothes to be ‘Harrods’ brought humanity back into an inhuman sphere.
We need the hope as well as the horror to remind us that humanity is capable of both extremes, particularly in such a war-torn and bloodsoaked era as ours. If the Great War was intended to be the war to end all wars, yet less than thirty years later humans could commit such atrocities against their fellow man, then we’ll need an awful lot more hope in the twenty-first century.
Have your say!