Night Will Fall / "Наступит ночь" 

фильм Сидни Бернстайна и Альфреда Хичкока, созданный на основе документальных съемок во время освобождения концлагерей

 

09.01.2014

Центр документального кино показывает 27 января, в день 70-летия освобождения Освенцима, документальный фильм Night Will Fall, созданный голливудскими режиссерами и продюсерами Бреттом Рэтнером и Андре Сингером на основе долгое время запрещенной в Великобритании киноработы Альфреда Хичкока и Сидни Берстайна, посвященной холокосту..

Пользуясь архивами британской, американской и советской армий режиссер Сидни Бернстайн создал документальный фильм, обличающий результат того, что происходило на территории нацистских концлагерей. Участие в работе над фильмом также принимал Альфред Хичкок, который вносил правки в черновую сборку и план монтажа. Рассказывают, что мастер триллера был настолько потрясен кадрами освобождения Берген-Бельзена, что неделю не появлялся на студии. Фильм также включает сцены освобождения Дахау, Бухенвальда и ряда других концлагерей.К 70-летию освобождения Европы от нацизма пленки отреставрировали и подготовили фильм в редакции, задуманной Бернстайном и Хичкоком. Кроме того, авторы новой версии разыскали тех немногих, кто выжил в лагерях и попал в хронику 45 года. Ключевую роль в работе над релизом сыграл Андре Сингер - исполнительный продюсер фильма "Акт убийства" (номинация на "Оскар-2014", лауреат BAFTA, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, European Film Awards и др.).

Об истории картины, долгое время запрещенной на родине Хичкока, в Великобритании, рассказывает в кадре актриса Хелена Бонэм Картер.

Когда работа над фильмом была завершена, союзное военное правительство в Берлине решило, что картина принесет больше вреда, чем пользы, и она так и не была показана. Изначально цель фильма была в том, чтобы указать немцам на ответственность за преступления.

Пять из шести оригинальных катушек с пленкой были переданы в Имперский военный музей в Лондоне, где их в начале 80-х годов нашел американский исследователь. Незаконченный фильм был представлен на Берлинском кинофестивале в 1984 году, а в 1985-м его показали по американскому телевидению под названием "Память о лагерях" / Memory of the Camps/.

http://cdkino.ru/event/22502/

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/alfred-hitchcocks-unseen-holocaust-documentary-to-be-screened-9044945.html

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The British Army Film Unit cameramen who shot the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 used to joke about the reaction of Alfred Hitchcock to the horrific footage they filmed. When Hitchcock first saw the footage, the legendary British director was reportedly so traumatised that he stayed away from Pinewood Studios for a week. Hitchcock may have been the king of horror movies but he was utterly appalled by "the real thing".

In 1945, Hitchcock had been enlisted by his friend and patron Sidney Bernstein to help with a documentary on German wartime atrocities, based on the footage of the camps shot by British and Soviet film units. In the event, that documentary was never seen.

"It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British," suggests Dr Toby Haggith, Senior Curator at the Department of Research, Imperial War Museum. "Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there."

The film took far longer to make than had originally been envisaged. By late 1945, the need for it began to wane. The Allied military government decided that rubbing the Germans' noses in their own guilt wouldn't help with postwar reconstruction.

Five of the film's six reels were eventually deposited in the Imperial War Museum and the project was quietly forgotten.

In the 1980s, the footage was discovered in a rusty can in the museum by an American researcher. It was eventually shown in an incomplete version at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984 and then broadcast on American PBS in 1985 under the title Memory of the Camps but in poor quality and without the missing sixth reel. The original narration, thought to have been written by future Labour Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman in collaboration with Australian journalist Colin Wills, was read by actor Trevor Howard.

Now, finally, the film is set to be seen in a version that Hitchcock, Bernstein and the other collaborators intended. The Imperial War Museum has painstakingly restored it using digital technology and has pieced together the extra material from the missing sixth reel. A new documentary, Night Will Fall, is also being made with André Singer, executive producer of The Actof Killing, as director and Stephen Frears as directorial advisor. Both the original film about the camps and the new documentary will be shown on British TV in early 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the "liberation" of Europe. Before that, next year, they are due to be shown together at festivals and in cinemas.

The decision to revive the film is bound to provoke anguished debate. It includes truly shocking footage of the camps (Belsen-Bergen in particular.) The film's own commentary, which has been re-recorded with a new actor, has a phrase about "sightseers" at a "chamber of horrors".

Billy Wilder, who directed Death Mills (1945), an American film about the German atrocities, was forthright about why he did not want atrocity footage to be seen in later years. Wilder questioned whether it had worked in "re-educating" the German civilian population about what their leaders had been doing in their name.

Belsen concentration camp in 1945, while under British control after liberation (Getty)
"They [the Germans] couldn't cope with it. He [Wilder] told me people just left the screening or closed their eyes. They didn't want to see," Wilder's friend Volker Schlöndorff recalled in a 2011 interview. "They found out it was almost unbearable to see these documents and almost indecent for the victims or the people related to the victims."