Summary: Powerful, moving French film about concentration camps, directed by Alain Resnais.
Description: This film relies for its effect upon the juxtaposition of shots of the peaceful remains of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1955, shot in colour in springtime, with black and white footage from a variety of sources of the horrors of various concentration camps during the war. The 'documentary' footage consists of both film and photographs and chronicles the rounding up of Jews and criminals, the hierarchy of camp life, inmates in dormitories and at work, the atrocious medical experiments carried out on inmates, shots of heaps of the dead, aerial shots of the camps in 1945 and of SS guards burying the dead after the war. There are also photographs from Himmler's visit to a camp in 1942. The shots of Auschwitz in 1955 include slow pans across the exterior and the barbed wire fences, shots inside the dormitories showing the bunks and the latrines, shots of the hospital, inside the gas chamber and the incinerators. The purpose of the film is to illustrate honestly and forthrightly the horror of man's inhumanity to man and pose the problem, how was this possible?
