Memory of the Camps

GB 1945–1985. R.: Sidney Bernstein. 58'. Commentary read by Trevor Howard.
    Saturday 2 July 2005, Cinema Lumière 2, Cinema Lumière 2, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, theme “La messa in scena della guerra – il fronte inglese”.
    Presenta Toby Haggith (Imperial War Museum).

I watched the presentation only, having seen the film before, in the Berlin Film Festival ca 1985. Mr. Haggith told that Alfred Hitchcock’s role was only that of a treatment advisor, who told the film-makers to avoid all tricks of editing. But the cinematographers had already followed the same philosophy, carefully using long shots and pans to cover the vastness and the context of the crime as fully as possible, already realizing that the film footage was a legal document. They filmed in Belsen etc. where there were no gas chambers, the Holocaust victims being starved to death. They realized that film was the best and maybe the only way to document the crime. Yet the camera was unable to portray everything in the dark rooms, hospitals, etc. That was covered by sound and written documentation. Before the film, we saw a reel of silent camera footage starting with the bucolic idyll surrounding Belsen, and then step by step descending into the horror, breaking all taboos of the presentation of victims and the dead, for a reason, and also involving footage of the Gestapo officials (here mostly women). Mr. Haggith told that the Soviet material of the Eastern camps survives and could be reconstructed. So Hitchcock was not centrally involved in the film, but I feel that this footage marked him, and Psycho was, among other things, his way to deal with the Holocaust.