Holocaust
Saskia Baron
This is an impeccably restored presentation of the 1945 feature-length documentary that was intended to be shown in German cinemas in order to counter any remaining support for Nazism. Backed by the British Ministry of Information, it was overseen by Sidney Bernstein and involved commissioning or gathering footage from army cameraman (American, British and Soviet) present at the liberation of the concentration camps, as well as from newsreel cameramen.The assembled film, shot in over 14 locations including Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, did not spare viewers’ sensitivities. Forty-three cameramen Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Armenian genocide by the Ottomans during and after World War One killed 1.5 million people and is a wound that won’t heal for Armenians, though modern-day Turkey continues to insist that no genocide occurred. It’s only through the efforts of Armenian-American billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, whose family fled the killings, that The Promise came to be made, thanks to him putting up most of the $100 million production costs. But he died in 2015, so never saw the finished product.He would probably have been pleased that it was made at all, but for all its noble intentions and the horrors it Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not yet stirred. The door swung open to reveal, lying on the bed, a young woman in a cotton dress rolled over on her side, an older supine man wearing a jaunty moustache and a punctilious tie. The woman’s body was still warm.Word of the suicide of the famous writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte hastened as rapidly around the globe as any news could, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As alternative facts go, few are as grievous as the assertion that the Holocaust didn't happen. That's the claim on which the British historian (I use that word advisedly) David Irving has staked an entire career. Its day in court provides sufficient fuel to power the new film Denial, even when the creative team don't always seem to be giving the charged material their best shot. I exempt from that charge a first-rate cast in which a lips-pursed, blazing-eyed Timothy Spall excels yet again, this time playing Irving. And the stakes posed by the narrative are high enough that one is Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There will surely be no end to the debate as to how any work of art can approach treating the Holocaust, and its depiction in cinema, with the great immediacy of that form, has always been especially problematic. Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’s 1965 film The Shop on the High Street (Obchod na korze) certainly stands in the very first rank of such attempts, its depiction of how a civilian population becomes complicit in treatment of outsiders remaining as insightful and necessary today as ever.Kadár and Klos’s film achieves that rarest thing, the convincing introduction of elements of comedy into a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focused little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1930s Poland is dismally familiar. The story of life-affirming music made in the jaws of hell – the starving ghetto, the Nazi work camp – has been amply covered on page and screen. And one’s first thought during the opening 10 minutes of this production is, slightly guiltily: do I really have to look this horror in the face yet again? But at a time when the storm clouds of extreme nationalism are Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In the world of the concentration camp, clothes or the lack of them sealed your fate. What you wore marked out your role; whether it was the blue-gray Waffen SS uniform, a doctor’s grubby white coat, the striped suits given to slave-workers, or your own clothes from your former life. The first images of Son of Saul are a soft blur of figures in a distant wood, but walking swiftly to camera and into sharp focus is one man, Saul Auslander (Géza Röhrig). He’s wearing an overcoat with a big red cross on its back, an easy target if he should try to escape. His deep-set eyes bear the expression of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Following his inclusion in this year’s Venice and Istanbul biennials, Italian artist Fabio Mauri has leapt into the limelight. He is from the same generation as Mario Merz; but whereas Merz and his Arte Povera colleagues have long since enjoyed an international reputation for work which features non-art materials in a raw state (hence the name "Poor Art"), Mauri has languished in relative obscurity – until now, that is.Oscuramento, his first solo show in London for 20 years, provides the chance to catch up; but there is a problem – how to contextualise work which feels dated, because it was Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Few cities have been so central to the European imagination as Berlin in the 20th century. At the centre of imperial power, then of Weimar, next the hub of Nazi Germany, then for some 50 years a symbol of a divided Cold War world. In Rose Lewenstein’s new play, Now This Is Not the End, the city is remembered with a touch of nostalgia by Eva, an old German lady living in London. But these memories are under threat: she is beginning to suffer from dementia so her vivid recollections are becoming cloudy – can anyone help her preserve her past?Living with her second husband Arnold, Eva has sold Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Enjoy the war, for the peace will be savage,” was apparently a macabre joke circulating in the German military towards the end of World War Two. Peter Molloy’s searing documentary, 1945: The Savage Peace, showed us just how prescient it would prove, charting the cruelties that would follow the end of conflict. Man’s inhumanity to man would continue long after the war itself had formally ended.It showed itself in many different forms of vengeance and reprisal. Soviet troops advancing on Berlin raped German women of all ages on an almost unimaginable scale, not something that’s mentioned in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a great, neglected film of Nazi Germany. After being savaged by German critics for its “subjective” and “sentimental” perspective on the Third Reich at its 1980 Berlin Festival premiere, it was released with 30 minutes slashed. This is the restored director’s cut’s DVD debut.Writer-director Helma Sanders-Brahms’s view certainly is subjective, and feminine. Germany Pale Mother is a fictionalised version of her early childhood with her parents: here young lovers Hans (Ernst Jacobi) and Lene (Eva Mattes), separated and destroyed by war. Lene’s home front heroism and bond with daughter Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although the shadows of the Holocaust and German guilt hang over Christian Petzold’s sixth outing with his formidable muse Nina Hoss, Phoenix is more concerned with the essence of female identity. It contextualises in dreadful circumstances and iterates, as no other film has done in recent years, the politically incorrect but no less obvious and appalling notion that a woman’s face is her most valuable real estate, the thin, fragile wall that separates her from emotional destitution.A woman effaced, this fable-like drama insists, is a woman invalidated – a theme previously explored, in Read more ...