A Film Canon

This harrowing documentary juxtaposes contemporary footage of Auschwitz and Majdanek with archival footage of concentration camp construction, incarceration and procedure, to present the Holocaust as an event that both demands and eludes cinematic remembrance. On the one hand, Resnais emphasises cinema's unprecedented documentary potential, and proximity to death, incorporating material that had barely circulated, let alone been included in a feature film: "A message flutters to the ground. Will it be found? Death makes its first cut." On the other hand, he draws a common denominator between Nazi deindividuation, dehumanisation and commodification, and the implications of montage itself - literally, by including excerpts from Nazi propaganda films, and presenting various instances of the ways in which images of Jews were rationalised and circulated within the camps; stylistically, by way of the lists, tabulations and enumerations that imbue his narration with such extraordinary rhythm and gravitas. This accelerates the archival material into a scansion of the aphorisms that framed the camps ("Cleanliness is health", "Work is freedom", "To each his due"), drawing an uneasy, staccato connection between director and dictator. By contrast, the contemporary footage is overwhelmingly fluid, largely composed of extended tracks towards unknowable, visceral voids (latrines, the air vents from torture chambers, the ovens), and tactile close-ups of rubble, as if taking cinema's sensitivity to the ravages and nuances of time to its extremity, willing stone to speak. That said, cinematographer Sacha Vierney's insistence on the lush, lurid colour of these segments ultimately belies any real documentary import, suggesting a very small distance between superficial and spectatorial attitudes to trauma: "A crematorium can seem like a picture postcard. Today tourists have their holiday photos taken outside them."