Representing the Shoah in cinema and on television, from the 1950s to today, has always been an enigma. By its very nature, a disturbing image tends to push viewers away. But at the same time nothing like an image can document – indeed, the word itself says it, immortalise – what happened, beyond appeal, beyond refutation. On this ulcerating set of scales, directors, historians and artists have tried to maintain their balance in attempting to tell the story of the greatest massacre in modern history.
The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)
A film of almost three hours, in black and white, which is highly recommended viewing for Siniša Mihajlović.
Amsterdam, 1942. The Germans occupy the country and persecute the Jews. A Jewish family, the Franks, shuts itself away in an attic of Mr Frank's spice factory, together with some friends. Despite the extremely harsh living conditions, young Anne Frank manages to find moments of carefree joy and entrusts her thoughts to the pages of her diary. But one dreadful day the Franks are arrested and deported.
Published throughout the world, the young girl's diary was also brought to the stage, and director George Stevens made a rather serious film from it, casting a girl who had never acted in films before, Millie Perkins, in the role of the thirteen-year-old protagonist.
Eichmann (2016)
Day after day, over 120 sessions, the horror of the extermination camps was recounted live by the victims, and heard by the entire world. American documentary filmmaker Leo Hurwitz produced the documentary about Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal figures responsible for the Holocaust – the first televised trial of the Nazis. In Israel it was broadcast live on the radio. In the rest of the world, the television footage arrived a few days late (the time needed to send the reels). The Nazi leader under Hitler organised the rail transport of the deportees and was accused of being among the architects of the Final Solution. The Mossad had captured him in 1960 in Argentina, where he was living under a false name.
Eichmann was tried in 1961 in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity.
The story of the first global media event and of the production team that had to overcome a thousand obstacles to obtain the judges' authorisation for its broadcast is now told in this film by Paul Andrew Williams. The film, released in cinemas as a special event from 25 to 27 January, reconstructs the behind-the-scenes of the incredible work of producer Milton Fruchtman (Martin Freeman) and Hurwitz (Anthony LaPaglia), who, at the end of each day, edited the highlights of the hearings to send them to television stations in 37 countries around the world.
Night will fall – Perché non scenda la notte (2015)
It has been called "Alfred Hitchcock's documentary about the Shoah." The footage about the liberation of the extermination camps was indeed initially overseen by Alfred Hitchcock, dispatched as a war correspondent on behalf of the British military authorities. A short film – approximately 50 extraordinary minutes of black and white, entitled "Memory of the camps" – was locked away in a drawer for more than 60 years and has today been rediscovered thanks to the Imperial War Museum in London. In 1945, immediately after the end of the war, producer Sidney Bernstein set off for Bergen-Belsen, where he found some British and American army cameramen who had already been filming for weeks the atrocities they had encountered at the moment of liberation.
When the film was ready, however, Washington and London did not feel it was diplomatically appropriate to throw a nation's worst abominations back in its face – a nation that needed to be rebuilt and with which dialogue was resuming. And so the material ended up in a drawer, where it remained until the 1980s.
It can be watched in its entirety here, on Rai.tv
Shoah (Shoah, 1985)
To gather and complete this film of testimonies, Claude Lanzmann spent eleven years, starting from 1974. When it was released in cinemas in '85, this nine-and-a-half-hour film was immediately hailed as a landmark event, both historically and cinematographically.
The book with 4 DVDs can be purchased here: Einaudi.
Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955)
The director is the Alain Resnais of "Hiroshima mon amour." This 30-minute film was commissioned by the Comité d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the end of the war. A large part of the film is in fact constructed from archival footage, including colour footage shot at Auschwitz-Birkenau around 1954. The music was composed especially for the film by Hanns Eisler, of Jewish origin.
It can be watched in its entirety (divided into two videos) here.
The Nuremberg Trials (1977)
Thanks to a YouTube user who transferred it from a VHS cassette, we can all now rewatch this documentary online. It is the Italian version of the work (1 hour and 11 minutes) by Henri de Turenne, "Le procès de Nuremberg." De Turenne was a great journalist, the author of more than 100 documentaries. He was a correspondent for Afp, which sent him to Berlin and Korea, and he received the Prix Albert Londres in 1952 for his reportages in Le Figaro. He later worked at France Soir and at Ortf. The Algerian War played a major role in his life before the launch, in 1967, of the series of documentaries on the Great Battles, produced with Pathé, which made him famous, to which this film belongs.
The Nuremberg Trials can be watched here, on YouTube.
Primo Levi. Se questo è un uomo (1995)
"You who live secure in your warm houses, you who find on returning in the evening warm food and friendly faces: consider if this is a man." These are the opening lines of Primo Levi's novel, written between December 1945 and January 1947, as a testimony to what the author personally experienced in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. The words are inspired by the ancient prayer of the Shema and explain the title. And – read by Giancarlo Giannini – they are also reprised at the opening of this one-hour-twenty-minute documentary by the Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (Cdec), featuring testimonies from survivors of the Deportation and of the Nazi concentration camps. To make it, 93 Italian Jews who survived deportation were interviewed.
La shoah dei bambini (1992)
Rai Storia offers, among a great deal of courageous and extremely interesting material on the subject, this ten-minute documentary centred on the condition of children during those terrible years. Using archival material, the horror experienced by Jewish children during Nazism is reconstructed, beginning with a page from the Diary of Anne Frank that speaks of the obligations they were subjected to. From there the account unfolds through drawings, testimonies and dramatic images, including episodes of parents abandoning their children in the hope of saving their lives. The number of young victims of the Shoah during the Second World War was extremely high, both inside and outside the concentration camps.
The documentary can be watched here, on Rai Storia.
Da Bologna a Stalino (1942-2013)
A previously unseen video about the deportation of the Jews, unearthed by Home Movies, has been rediscovered and restored. It is an exceptional piece of footage by Enrico Chierici, a cameraman who in 1942, while filming Italian troops travelling towards the front, also came across the convoys of deportees making the opposite journey by train. And they appeared, judging by their faces, unaware of their fate: they lean out almost smiling through the gaps in the wagons. The video, with an original duration of 20 minutes, is unfortunately silent, and only a 5-minute extract can be viewed online. A shame – it would be worth publishing it in its entirety.
