Learning on ScreenNight Will Fall
Night Will Fall. GB. DVD. BFI. 75 minutes + 150 miinutes extras. £19.99
About the reviewer: Professor Gordon has published widely on 20th-century Italian literature, cinema and cultural history. He is the author or editor of several books on the work of Primo Levi, including Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues, Auschwitz Report and The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. He is co-editor of Culture, Censorship and the State in 20th-Century Italy and a study of cultural responses to the Holocaust in Italy. His work on cinema includes the books Pasolini, Forms of Subjectivity and Bicycle Thieves (BFI Classics series); DVD and blu-ray audio commentaries on Pasolini’s Teorema and Bicycle Thieves; and articles and essays on Holocaust cinema, early film and literature, ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’, and censorship.
Recovered footage from the Nazi era has become a powerful (and highly risky) means for contemporary filmmakers to interrogate the history and the memorial traces of the Holocaust. Examples include Harun Farocki’s Respite (2007), which drew on found footage of Westerbork transit camp in Holland; or Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010), which reworked a Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw ghetto from 1942. André Singer’s compelling and often awful Night Will Fall recounts another, very different ‘film unfinished,’ this time an Allied ‘propaganda’ project of 1945. It tells the remarkable story of the abortive effort by an Allied psychological warfare unit, led by producer Sidney Bernstein, to put together a film on the liberation of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, the moment when the world first became aware of the true horrors of the Holocaust. The result is a viscerally unforgettable film, an important historical document and an important document in film history.
The history the film relates comes in several layers. The camp liberations themselves took place in 1944 and early 1945, as Allied armies stumbled across remnant sites of the Nazi ‘Lager’ system across occupied Europe: the Soviets at Majdanek and Auschwitz, the British at Bergen-Belsen, the Americans at Dachau. Radio, print and newsreel reports, voices such as Richard Dimbleby’s and Ed Murrow’s, scarred their nations’ collective psyches with devastating accounts of what they saw there. Then came official, army or state-sponsored films, made for use in evidence or for re-education of Axis populations. As many as nine of these were in production in 1945 and Bernstein’s was the most developed of them all. Commissioned in London, he gathered a remarkable team of cameramen, editors and writers, and set to work furiously on the blandly titled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. But progress on a final edit stalled and by summer 1945, political and military priorities had shifted: the project was quietly shelved. (Other shorter, and rougher, efforts were completed, such as Billy Wilder’s Death Mills.) Jump forward several decades and the Imperial War Museum, which held all the footage and paperwork in its archives, painstakingly restored and completed Bernstein’s unfinished film. Inspired in turn by this act of recovery, Singer set out to recount the whole story, through recorded and contemporary voices of survivors and the original filmmakers, in Night Will Fall.
The cluster of individuals involved means that the film is also something of a ‘missing link’ in the history of film and documentary. Intriguing connections abound: to the British documentary movement (through editor Stewart McAllister); to British political and intellectual history (through socialist politician and thinker, Richard Crossman); to the grand figures of British film and television (through Bernstein himself and through the tantalisingly brief involvement of Alfred Hitchcock). And the film looks forward too to the long history of Holocaust and genocide documentary, from Night and Fog (1955) to Shoah (1985), up to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), for both of which Singer was executive producer.
… however difficult, this is absolutely necessary viewing
All this layering is lucidly evoked and explained in Night Will Fall, but it is the sheer grim force of the liberation images that linger in the mind. If ever there were fears that we are inured to the shock of Holocaust imagery today, the experience of watching this film allays them. This presents serious challenges to the educationalist, since much preparatory work is needed to introduce such material to young viewers. A good starting-point would be the DVD extras, which are extensive and extremely impressive. They include other liberation films (Death Mills, the Soviet Oświęcim) that share some of the same footage; and informative interviews with historians, film scholars and Bernstein’s biographer. The online resources of the Imperial War Musuem are another excellent external support. The effort is more than worthwhile: however difficult, this is absolutely necessary viewing.
Robert S. C. Gordon
