Night Will Fall

When Allied armies began liberating German concentration camps in 1944, the horrors were captured on celluloid, but a British project to assemble the footage into a documentary that would stand as proof of Nazi atrocities was halted, mostly due to post-war changes in international policy (although some of the footage was used as evidence at the Nuremberg war crime trials). André Singer's film is in large part about the efforts of British and American camera crews to record for posterity what the liberators found (while forcing Germans who were living nearby to confront it), but it also follows the quest of Sidney Bernstein, a producer at the British Ministry of Information, to fashion the raw material into a finished work—a project for which he enlisted Alfred Hitchcock, who flew from America to advise him. To the archival material—which also includes footage shot by Soviet crews on the Eastern Front—Singer adds contemporary interviews with surviving cameramen and soldiers (British, American, and Russian) who liberated the camps, all still struggling with what they witnessed; members of Bernstein's editing crew; and reminiscences from some of the camp survivors seen in the original footage. And there's a clip from an interview with Billy Wilder, who used some of the filmed material in a Defense Department short called Death Mills, which was shown in German theatres (although not in the U.S.). Night Will Fall is both a harrowing record of the crimes perpetrated in the camps and a sobering testament of how post-war political concerns—particularly with respect to the rebuilding of Germany as a bulwark against Communist expansion—impacted the revelations of the full truth. Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. (F. Swietek)