This film presents footage from the stoic aftermath of the Holocaust. The story is told through the narrator, the only voice present in the entire movie. Even though they had no audio to match the video, it sorta plays into its own metaphor that the victims of this massacre had no voice. This helps establish that this is more than a documentary; it signifies that it is a pertinent moment in our history and that we should pay attention to the fragility of the human cycle.
The movie was juxtaposing moments of peacefulness with moments of gore, as well as showcasing them in the same shot to show their inevitable inseparability.
The images of life and growth in the beginning of the film was represented through shots of families, children, city scapes; normal life. These clips only appear in the beginning to signify normality, the beginning of where it all began. Only in the beginning of the movie, before the war erupted, could we see the stability that was once these people’s lives.
The movie also went half and half with this idea of life and death. Throughout, shots of meadows and still-life in the green made you think of a tucked away farm or factory on the outskirts of a larger, populated centrum. In the middle of a nature centrum, these death factories were kept a secret between the hierarchy for nearly the entire time they were operating. The buildings were designed to be as plain as possible, using the basic architecture to transcribe normality, a smoke screen for everything that was hidden behind. These jump cuts from meadow to human body to overgrown railroad to shutting doors; they all stem from the physicality of the place itself. The way the earth was used, the way it was walked on, the institutions and formalities that were built on it. This concentration camp was contracted, built from nature, and then filled with its occupants. The film does a brilliant job at disclosing the origins of the site as well as the progression of the use of it.
But the movies visual focus wasn’t solely mimicking the natural cycle of death, it wanted to foremost highlight the human-imposed death that made the whole cycle start in the first place. Without the man, there would be no idea. Without the idea, the action of constructing the camp would have never sprung to life. Without the construction, the victims would never have filled it. The film goes into action and reaction sequences, and before and after shots. The explanatory or filler action scenes are usually followed up by gruesome reaction scenes of bodies being thrown limp or people looking empty at the camera, prompting the viewer to react immediately to the information being visually presented and audibly described.
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