[dropcap]N[/dropcap]ight Will Fall, a recent documentary by Andre Singer, is about the liberation of the German concentration camps during and after World War Two, which draws on footage taken at the camps by British soldiers, as well as interviews with Holocaust survivors and soldiers. The documentary takes as its narrative the story of an original film produced by Sidney Bernstein and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which was made from this same footage but remained unmade and unseen until Singer’s resurrection of the material. The scenes at the camps are unbearable. We are shown piles of prisoners’ toys, toothbrushes, and suitcases — hair and teeth too, carefully sorted. We witness bodies flung into pits in their thousands like rag dolls, weighing, it seems, hardly more in their emaciated deaths. These images are hard to reconcile with your own flesh and your own humanity. To see them, in the words of the soldiers and survivors whose interviews intercut these scenes, is pain.

One interviewee, a Scottish soldier present at the liberation of the notorious camp Bergen-Belsen, describes how the only way of functioning amongst these scenes was to remain completely dissociated. With this he identifies an issue at the heart of Night Will Fall, that of spectatorship. Singer raises the problem of blind eyes and negligent spectators, both then and now. He contrasts film as a passive vehicle of violent imagery detached from any moral, political or emotional impact, with the camera as witness and a tool for agency, which is how many of the camp survivors perceive it. In their interviews they express their relief at the existence of the footage, which some of them feature in, as hard evidence. In an interview with Thomson Reuters, Singer said how it is necessary to “shock people enough to take notice…The hope is that at least by seeing documentaries like this, by putting them across, every generation will pause before moving onto something else”. Night Will Fall challenges the easy, pleasurable, and unthinking consumption of the cheap thrills relied on by so much mainstream film and television.

Take, for example, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), a movie about the exploitation and violence of slavery, that itself exploits violence for enjoyment. Tarantino’s stylish aestheticisation of brutal subject matter ultimately trivialises violence as a sensory shock and becomes an exercise in the absurd, comic and surreal. Then there is Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), which makes the viewer confront the (uncomfortable) physical reality of violence, as well as the structural violence it reflects. A scene which epitomises McQueen’s cinematic approach is when protagonist Solomon Northup is left suspended from a tree, strung up so that the tips of his toes barely touch the ground to keep him from hanging. The scene is filmed in a steady shot lasting three minutes, making the viewer increasingly uneasy, and testing their threshold as part of McQueen’s re-politicisation of violence. The original camp footage in Night Will Fall also uses very long shots, panning in and out, lingering over vast open spaces covered with the dead and dying, in order to assure viewers that what they were seeing wasn’t fabricated. This cinematic technique, used by the original filmmakers and McQueen in the pursuit of realism, makes the viewer dwell on what they are being shown, and is unlike Tarantino’s fast-paced, sensationalist use of violence.

What is so interesting about Singer’s film, and prescient about Bernstein and Hitchcock’s, is the exploration of the relationship between the camera and violence, the viewer and the screen. The later film does this in part by looking at the impetus behind the original film, which was commissioned by the Allies after the war. The aim was to use the footage to create a vessel for cultural memory, an effort which seen at the time was considered a justified use of atrocity footage, until it was aborted by the British government for political reasons in the post-war climate. Singer references this by using as a title the final words of the Bernstein/Hitchcock film: “Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall”.  At his recent talk hosted by DU History and Film Soc, he justified how the atrocity footage in Night WIll Fall should be shown to all children to contextualise the proliferation of easily accessible and gratuitous graphic imagery made readily available by the internet and social media.

What Night Will Fall positions itself against is the sort of mass amnesia induced by the superficiality and spectacle of so much of pop culture. It is easier, perhaps, to forget that which is beyond belief, a sentiment that Night Will Fall wholly rejects with its shocking imagery of the world’s first industrialised mass genocide. WWII was also the first war in history to be documented on film, at the moment when film was at its advent as a widely consumed cultural medium, making the camp footage both the cinematic precedence and the cultural origin of the ubiquitous killing and maiming on our screens today, which is enabled by the same technical revolution that brought the camera into the camps and trenches in the hands of stunned soldiers.

Night Will Fall reinstates the momentous impact of the Holocaust and WWII, which we rarely process as a culture in conjecture with visual images of this nature. It re-contextualises history and violence: the arbitrary persecution and meaningless suffering which was the Holocaust and is the narrative (non)context of much popular violence. Night Will Fall throws into harsh relief the sadistic voyeurism, the painless enjoyment of pain, that constitutes contemporary spectatorship, in what is the most radical work you’ll see on the big screen this year.