It’s tough and not pleasant viewing, but it is a wonderful
piece of craftsmanship. I’m glad the Imperial War Museum decided to finish the
piece Bernstein and his team began all those years ago and that Singer and his
team documented that process. Simply put - just watch it.
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Since watching the documentary I watched the brief clip on
the Channel 4 website which sees director, Andre Singer and producer Sally
Angel talk about the process of making the documentary and it was an
enlightening five minutes. Both spoke openly about the process and made some
very thought provoking statements which have added to the impact Night Will Fall has had on me as a
viewer.
To begin with, Singer recalls how they’d begun with the
intention of making a historian/expert led piece, but quickly realised the need
to tell it from the perspective of those who were there and so ditched all the
material they had already recorded and began again. He goes on to say that this
documentary:
“has a particular resonance, number one, because it is the 70th
anniversary of the liberation of the camps at the end of the war and the
generation that participated either as victims, or saw it or were there, sadly
of course are dying and this is probably the last chance to look back from living
memory”.
I mean how true – yet
it’s probably not something many of us think about, or don’t wish to think
about. It is in living memory – most of what we know is told by those who lived
through it and who survived, yet at the same time, it’s seems like so long ago
because we struggle to comprehend a society in which that could be allowed
happen (I know there are recent and on going events that spark comparison but
I’m concentrating on this one event for the moment).
The importance of the
documentary is further compounded by a comment by Angel:
“I think it’s a kind of undocumented side of things that people who do
bear witness to atrocity, cameramen, journalists and film makers often have to
carry quite a lot of stuff with them that they can’t then share with other
people, so for me there is an important element that actually we have to look
at ways in which we honour people who bear witness to atrocity…”
In the documentary, those
cameramen who recorded the footage are overcome with emotion as much as those
survivors who recalled their experiences. They’ve been traumatised too, and
again that’s not something I’ve often thought about.
Therefore, in finishing the film,
the IWM have completed an act of remembrance; a way in which to honour the
people who made it and have had to live with those experiences, because they
were ordered to go into the camps and film what they saw; just as much as it
honours the memory of those who lost their lives there as victims, by recording
what happened. It provides context for the material, you’re not just watching
archive footage, but are told the story of who was involved and why. As Angel
comments, ‘it’s a really important piece
of documentary evidence about what happened when the Allies went in and
liberated the camps” and having finished that, as the original film makers
intended, has meant that that record is now preserved for many years to come.
I’m sure there will be critics of
this documentary, those who say it is too macabre and graphic in its imagery, but
it appears all these decisions were ones Singer didn’t make lightly:
“We had to make quite severe choices about how much archive to put in
and for me the biggest dilemma in the whole making of the film was how far do
you got to show really horrific atrocity footage, to a public?…”
The intention originally was to make a film that would show
the Germans what the Nazi’s had done in their name, to spread guilt. But the
delay in finishing meant it lost its relevance and became politically sensitive
so was shelved by the British Government. Times have moved on and it holds
different meaning now, but that footage is still as horrific for anyone to view
and I am sure, as Singer describes, “you
don’t become anaesthetized to seeing the material”. We may be a modern
audience with different sensibilities but that degree of human suffering is
undoubtedly just as difficult to see today as it once was.
I’m forced to think about the first blog in this series
where I discussed the idea that every child should go to Auschwitz, or another
camp and I question my decision. The footage I saw when I watched this was very
unsettling for me as a 23 year old – I can’t imagine how I’d have responded as
a 15 year old. It’s tricky, because I stand by my original argument – I
wouldn’t be the person I was today if I hadn’t been, yet to reveal the unedited
truth, as the documentary and film footage depict, to a ‘child’… I don’t know.
That takes the education to a whole different level and I think, one that is
age sensitive.
Singer’s closing remark goes as follows:
“I’ve been quite shocked at how
little generations under my generation and certainly under the generation who
were there during the war, know really, about what happened, it’s kind of
already distant history and it shouldn’t be because it’s our living memory,
it’s our living history.”
I really don’t like to think of this as being true. I mean
can it be distant history after only 70 years? It still feels very recent to me,
I suppose because it is an event in living memory and I have been fortunate to
hear people recall their extra ordinary experiences first hand. It’s dominated
the school curriculum for so long and there is so much ‘history’ written about
that period, can people really know so little about what happened?
Singer goes on to talk about the modern relevance of the
documentary and the issues its raises – again issues I’ve thought about and
engaged with over recent weeks -:
“The subject matter I think has become more
relevant now because of what we’re seeing across Europe, across the world
perhaps, sort of an increase from the right… fundamentalism if you want to call
it that, or anti-Semitism and so on, are on the increase rather than decrease
and I think it’s a timely reminder of what happened last time, in the 1930s,
when that swept across Europe.”
We live in scary times and I hope to god it doesn’t take
another dramatic turn of events like this for society to reconfigure our sense
of tolerance and accept that we now live in multi-cultural and multi-faith
societies. An idealistic view perhaps but I’m sure I’m not alone.
The final words of the short video are given by Angel who
recites the last lines of the script - ‘unless the world learns the lesson
these pictures teach, night will fall. But by God’s grace we who live will
learn.’ She then concludes ‘well the question is, have we really learnt?” and I
ask you now the same question.
Link to press release - 
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