Film Review 2

The film we watched from 1982 titled Genocide by Arnold Schwartzman was a very raw and compelling one. The film told many aspects and points of view from the holocaust, using many different mediums. The animation, photographs, stories, narration, and documentary as a whole was very captivating and did an excellent job of telling the story of the millions of people who lost their lives during one of the most horrifying histories of World War II. It did a great job of balancing history and fact with emotion too.

One of my favorite aspects of the film was when they would have the narrators, Elizabeth Taylor or Orson Welles, tell the story and depict the voices of people that had experienced the Holocaust. The story told about the young girl who was shot and fell into the pit of dead bodies and then could feel the people below her that were still alive trying to claw their way out, as well as having more dead bodies shot on top of her, was incredibly enthralling. The way that the narration was carried out by Elizabeth and Orson, by reenacting the scene instead of just telling how it had happened, added a whole different feeling to the experience of watching this documentary.

I also enjoyed how the film was told from the beginning and pre-war life in Europe to time through the Holocaust and finally to the end of the war. I also appreciated that they used the quote “First They Came” from Pastor Martin Niemoller and examined the fact that something as awful as the Holocaust happened, and how people could let it happen. The last line of the statement, “Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.” is such a compelling one. It really examines how people did not speak up during the genocide, and how people could let something like this happen. I also appreciated when a poem from “I Never Saw Another Butterfly”, a collection of poems that I am very familiar with, was read and accompanied by an animation.

All together I believe the film did an excellent job of telling the very difficult story of the Holocaust. It used different stories and experiences from survivors to help explain the lack of humanity that people experienced during such an awful time in history. In this way I believe it did an excellent job of linking the holocaust to human rights issues by examining how inhumanely people were treated.