There have been several documentaries covering the concentration camps, not to mention countless papers, eye witness accounts and all the paraphernalia one would desire when researching this subject. This is good. It should be known how primitive a species we still are, and that our greatest conceptions and inventions, even now, all must pay heed to the savage instincts of the survival and reproduction of our genes. That with the appropriate logic and suitable conditions, we can turn back the clock, 50 years, 80 years, 900 years, 10,000 years, enough to fit the need.
As we edge closer and closer towards being able to say the German Nazi atrocities occurred over a century ago, more important now than ever is the restoration of this documentary.
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, restored and completed by the Imperial War Museum in 2014 is a jarring experience. Being filmed and cut mere months after the camps were liberated, the banality of evil feels all too potent here. Whilst being coated with decades of distance, outdated stats and the emphasis in the narration of profiling all citizens of a fascist state irrefutably as collaborators, which is still a solemn text despite this, the spontaneity, the fact that these were the first images of the Belsen and Auschwitz camps ever recorded, gives the film, dare I say, a melancholic tone. A sense of innocence, or more so ignorance, being lost. It had been a few decades since a man-made genocide of such a scale had been committed and the first in a few centuries that such specific discrimination had been used. For the first time, barbarism had thrived in the age of the moving picture, and unfortunately, there was more to come.
This documentary, scanned and restored, commands attention and doesn't let go. Sights such as beds wrapped in barbed wire and unburied corpses left to rot in the sun don't go away easily. What was most distressing for me though was the lack of passion in the prisoners. We get mere glimpses of relief, anger, sorrow, but for the most part, examining their faces, we get solid proof that the mind can die years before the body.
I do recommend this film. It does not patronise you with a music track, it does not sensationalise with wartime rhetoric despite edging at times so closely to being a propaganda film. It's an important historical document of the first reactions towards the Nazi concentration camps. It's as sophisticated and sincere an account we have from the time. This alone would make it essential viewing. But it is also coupled with strong moral fibre, a pro- humanitarian message and a universality unfounded amongst contemporary and even most modern examinations of these war crimes. All of which make German Concentration Camps Factual Study, a masterpiece of documentary cinema.
As we edge closer and closer towards being able to say the German Nazi atrocities occurred over a century ago, more important now than ever is the restoration of this documentary.
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, restored and completed by the Imperial War Museum in 2014 is a jarring experience. Being filmed and cut mere months after the camps were liberated, the banality of evil feels all too potent here. Whilst being coated with decades of distance, outdated stats and the emphasis in the narration of profiling all citizens of a fascist state irrefutably as collaborators, which is still a solemn text despite this, the spontaneity, the fact that these were the first images of the Belsen and Auschwitz camps ever recorded, gives the film, dare I say, a melancholic tone. A sense of innocence, or more so ignorance, being lost. It had been a few decades since a man-made genocide of such a scale had been committed and the first in a few centuries that such specific discrimination had been used. For the first time, barbarism had thrived in the age of the moving picture, and unfortunately, there was more to come.
This documentary, scanned and restored, commands attention and doesn't let go. Sights such as beds wrapped in barbed wire and unburied corpses left to rot in the sun don't go away easily. What was most distressing for me though was the lack of passion in the prisoners. We get mere glimpses of relief, anger, sorrow, but for the most part, examining their faces, we get solid proof that the mind can die years before the body.
I do recommend this film. It does not patronise you with a music track, it does not sensationalise with wartime rhetoric despite edging at times so closely to being a propaganda film. It's an important historical document of the first reactions towards the Nazi concentration camps. It's as sophisticated and sincere an account we have from the time. This alone would make it essential viewing. But it is also coupled with strong moral fibre, a pro- humanitarian message and a universality unfounded amongst contemporary and even most modern examinations of these war crimes. All of which make German Concentration Camps Factual Study, a masterpiece of documentary cinema.