9/25/2023 0 Comments Silent witness hitchcockGaunt, hollow eyes and gaping mouths frozen in silent screams. When the camera zooms in, we see limbs, as thin as bones, tangled together like pretzels. Night Will Fall shows many of these scenes, and they are rife with unspeakable details: Dead bodies are strewn across plots of land, some in heaps and others lined up like a carpet of human carcasses. They had just three months to complete the documentary from reels and reels of footage captured by those British, American and Russian cameramen. What he found there inspired his next endeavor: a full-length documentary that would portray the Nazis' horrific crimes so vividly it would be impossible to deny they ever took place.Īfter the American and British governments approved his film, Bernstein handpicked a powerhouse team, including editor Stewart McAllistar, writers Richard Crossman and Colin Willis, and a famous movie director, Alfred Hitchcock. The report was so stunning that, a couple of days later, Bernstein, then a leading film producer and head of film for Britain's psychological war department, made his way to the camp. And they were dying, every hour and every minute." The bony, emaciated faces of starving women too weak to come outside, propping themselves against the glass to see the daylight before they died. On each side of the road were brown wooden huts. "Dead bodies, some of them in decay, lay strewn about the road and along the rutted tracks. "I found myself in the world of a nightmare," he said. Initially, the BBC refused to air the report the broadcaster simply couldn't believe Dimbleby hadn't embellished the details. On April 19, 1945, BBC Radio aired a controversial report by Richard Dimbleby about his experience at Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany. It took a while for details about the concentration camps to get out. Along with them were soldiers who'd been trained as cameramen-young, brawny men with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and large, boxy cameras hoisted up on their shoulders, who arrived at concentration camps during their liberation to record the harrowing aftermath of the atrocities there. In the spring of 1945, British, American and Soviet troops were headed toward Berlin in the final days of the war. A new HBO documentary, Night Will Fall(January 26), directed by André Singer and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter and Jasper Britton, tells the story of how, 70 years later, this lost film came back to life. Everything-reels of footage, the script, the cameramen's notes-was boxed up and buried in the archives of the Imperial War Museums (IWM) in London. ![]() Yet by August of that year, the film was shelved by British authorities.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |