We have seen images of the holocaust and we have seen the documentaries but what makes Night Will Fall stand out is the unique angle. Seen through the lens of the soldiers-turned-cameramen who were the first to glimpse the horror of the camps, Night Will Fall’s footage was supposed to be collected into a documentary but was shelved at the time and forgotten about for over seventy years.
Opening with the simple narration-talking head style one might see on TV, Andre Singer quickly upends the viewer with some startling footage. Two high ranking German officers approach the allied forces who are about to stumble on a concentration camp near a small town in western Germany. Rife with typhoid, the Germans say, so best to avoid the camp and march on. A truce is called and the following scenes of the allied troops making their way past an edgy German platoon have a cold eeriness. On the allies went, to more villages that, with their smiling, waving inhabitants, are like a slice of heaven... until the smell hits.
Interviewing the cameraman, who believed the only way to keep rolling was by "withdrawing into another time, space, existence," the full horror of what unfolds as they experienced it. With some footage culled from what was going to be German Concentration Camp Factual Survey, and some taken from what the Russians were confronted with on the Eastern Front, Night Will Fall is a difficult watch. Included are interviews of survivors they caught on camera over those first few days. Here was "the whole human story."
But how to assemble the footage to present to the civilians back home? Producer Sidney Bernstein is called in, who asks friend Alfred Hitchcock to be supervising director. Bernstein wanted the footage to be as harrowing as possible, when contemporary reportage shied away from showing the gruesome details of war, and to ensure there was no doubt over the authenticity of the pictures: " I was afraid, quite rightly, that people would deny it."
What Hitchcock and Bernstein put together turned out to be a warning for humanity, but the Americans weren’t happy and used it as propaganda. Giving the footage to Billy Wilder to recalibrate, the film (titled Death Mills) became a shorter, more pointed and accusatory affair. It missed the point, as the last line states in the script written for the film that never was, "Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall."
Night Will Fall gets through a lot in its brief 71 minutes and all of it will stick.
