Holocaust History

This is a rather remarkable documentary made by left-wing filmmaker Leo Hurwitz and his wife, Peggy Lawson. This copy was made available on the Eastman Museum website.

Here’s how Hurwitz’s official website describes the film:
The result of a commission from Film Polski, the Polish Film Production Agency, to make a film on the concentration camps, The Museum and the Fury was made with access to the Film Polski archive, out of which Hurwitz integrated wartime footage with images of the reconstruction of Poland and various works of art.Read More »

Primo Levi’s modern day odyssey from the concentration camp to his home in Italy. The Truce is a film about homecoming.

The horror and the suffering of the concentration camps has been well documented. What interested the director, Francesco Rosi, was to bring to the screen what Levi succeeded in doing so extraordinarily well in his book: recounting, through the tales of his remarkable adventures, the process of reawakening, of coming back to life, and of the re-acquisition of hope, through the experience of daily events, small and large, natural and joyous, the cumulative effect of which is to constantly affirm the superiority of love over death.Read More »

The conceptual rigidity of Adamczewski’s film recalls the formal experiments of structural film in the 1970s. The care with which the film-maker handles her material has become rare in the digital age and for this reason deserves special attention. The tight cinematic framework into which Adamczewski forces the vigour of her research makes this film an extremely intense experience. It is the product of a generation determined to resist the right-wing movement in German society.Read More »

Claus Räfle’s “The Invisibles” tells the true story of four Jewish teenagers—Cioma Schönhaus (Max Mauff), Hanni Lévy (Alice Dwyer), Ruth Arndt-Gumpel (Ruby O. Fee), Eugen Friede (Aaron Altaras)—who chose to remain in Berlin during the Holocaust. We are provided a title card which states that 7,000 Jewish people chose to stay in the city. Only 1,500 survived. For the most part, the film is a compelling docudrama, smooth and confident in juggling reenactments, interviews of actual survivors, and black-and-white footages—occasionally in color—of Nazi occupied Berlin. And yet, appropriately, it is not a sentimental or melodramatic picture. Instead, it aspires to be a grave reminder of a horrible past beyond imagination and an admonition of a potential future should we fail to learn from our history.(Cinéologist , letterboxd)Read More »

An investigation of the evidence for Hitler’s Final Solution, together with a dramatic reconstruction of key courtroom exchanges in the libel case lost by the historian David Irving, who was accused of being anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier.Read More »

Quote:
The incredible story of Israel’s rebirth – this landmark series is the masterpiece of Israeli documentaries and the crowning achievement of Israeli television.

Pillar of Fire relates the drama of the Jewish people’s return to Zion and the establishment of the state of Israel. It is an extensive documentary production that feature rare documentary footage collected from more than 30 archives and private collections throughout the world, as well as many eye-witness interviews. This documentary series also portrays the Jewish-Arab struggle for Palestine, persecution of Jews in Europe, the war of 1948 and David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of independence.Read More »

Quote:
He is primarily interested in the way in which these films seem to depict only happy moments, but on closer consideration they also appear to tell a hidden history, which can be brought back to the surface by the recycling filmmaker.

In the travelogue The Danube Exodus, he documents the Jewish exodus from Slovakia just before the beginning of World War II. In two boats, a group of nine hundred Slovak, Austrian Jews tried to reach the Black Sea via the river Danube, in order to get to Palestine from there. Forgács based his film on the amateur films of Captain Nándor Andrásovits, the captain of one of the boats.
Read More »

Voyage of the Damned is a 1976 war drama film directed by Stuart Rosenberg, with an all-star cast featuring Faye Dunaway, Oskar Werner, Lee Grant, Max von Sydow, James Mason, and Malcolm McDowell.

The story was inspired by actual events concerning the fate of the ocean liner St. Louis carrying Jewish refugees from Germany to Cuba in 1939. It was based on a 1974 nonfiction book of the same title written by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts. The screenplay was written by Steve Shagan and David Butler. The film was produced by ITC Entertainment and released by Rank Film Distributors in the UK and Avco Embassy Pictures in the US.Read More »

Quote:
An inspired, award-winning story about the power of love and the human spirit, Life Is Beautiful has been called a modern masterpiece! Guido – a charming but bumbling waiter who’s gifted with a colourful imagination and an irresistible sense of humour – has won the heart of the woman he loves and created a beautiful life for his young family. But then, that life is threatened by World War II…and Guido must rely on those very same strengths to save his beloved wife and son from an unthinkable fate. Honoured with an overwhelming level of critical acclaim, this truly exceptional, utterly unique motion picture will lift your spirits and capture your heart.Read More »