Holocaust Documentary

Night and Fog - One of the most vivid depictions of the horrors of Nazi Concentration Camps. Filmed in 1955 at the post-war site of Auschwitz, the film combines color footage with black and white newsreels and stills to tell the story of not just only the Holocuast, but the horror of man''s brutal inhumanity

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps� quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and Fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man�s violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.

Shoah, - Claude Lanzmann directed this 9 1/2 hour documentary of the Holocaust without using a single frame of archive footage. He interviews survivors, witnesses, and ex-Nazis (whom he had to film secretly since though only agreed to be interviewed by audio). His style of interviewing by asking for the most minute details is effective at adding up these details to give a horrifying portrait of the events of Nazi genocide. He also shows, or rather lets some of his subjects themselves show, that the anti-Semitism that caused 6 million Jews to die in the Holocaust is still alive in well in many people that still live in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere

SHOAH is a magical film about the most barbaric act of the 20th century. Previous commentaries on the Holocaust, with its ravished skeletons and corpses, have left us shaken, but now for the first time, we experience it in our heads, in our flesh.

Claude Lanzmann spent eleven years spanning the globe for surviving camp inmates, SS commandants, and eyewitnesses of the Final Solution - the Nazi''s effort to systematically exterminate human beings. Without dramatic enactment or archival footage, but with extraordinary testimonies, SHOAH renders the step-by step machinery of extermination, the minutiae of timetables and finances, the logistics of herding victims into the gas chambers and disposing of the corpses afterward, the bureaucratic procedures which expedited the killing of millions of people without mentioning the words "killing" or "people."

Through haunted landscapes and human voice, the past comes brilliantly alive. SHOAH is a heroic endeavor to humanize the inhuman, to tell the untellable. It is an immensely disturbing, even shattering experience, yet in its solemnity and beauty not a morbid or disheartening one.

There are few works of art which leave one with such a deep appreciation for the preciousness and meaning of life.

"Shoah, the title of Claude Lanzmann''s documentary, means chaos or annihilation, and is the name that Israelis have given to the Holocaust. Yet there are no old newsreels, few interviews with survivors and no coverage of war crimes trials. Lanzmann spent six years simply looking for eyewitnesses. Most of those witnesses are Germans and Poles who either worked in the camps or observed what went on in them. The faces of the interviewees are interspersed with sequences of the places where the deaths took place, not as they were but as they are now. Grass and flowers grow on the mass graves, the tracks on which the inmates were transported are still used by trains, and the concentration camps themselves look like disused factories. The horror lies not in what we see but in what we are told.[...] They make Shoah one of the most remarkable films ever made - a terrible matter-of-fact document that makes David Irving''s anti-history fade into insignificance. Strangely, the quieter Shoah gets, the more it resonates. Once seen, never forgotten."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lanzmann

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_(film)

Alain Resnais
Night and Fog
Shoah (Catastrophe)
An Oral History of the Holocaust
Claude Lanzmann