Auschwitz   Starring: Uwe Boll, Nik Goldman, Steffen Mennekes and Arved Birnbaum High Fliers Films RRP: £12.99 HFR0123 Certificate: 15 Available 11 July 2011

Auschwitz (2011 - 1 hr, 10 min, 56 sec) is an attempt by writer/director Uwe Boll to show what happened at the concentration camp, without heroes and villains, in a documentary form. The film has an introduction from the director.

It’s a laudable enterprise to bring to the fore the reality of the camps without the sheen of a movie - Uwe was also moved by the almost total ignorance of modern German youth about their own history. As an outsider this seems incredible, except for two things. I asked a German friend of mine what was taught in schools about the war, she replied that German history ends with the turn of the nineteenth century and picks up in the 1950’s completely missing out the two world wars. So why should anyone be surprised that Germans know little about Hitler and the concentration camps. Secondly, English youth are not exactly bursting with historical information; unless you think knowing which girls group a particular singer started out with - this is just the nature of a lot of young people.

Uwe’s attempt to show what happened in the camps is fatally flawed from the outset. His use of music is used to convey emotional response. Often melancholy and with foreboding the music score undermines the idea that this is a film which makes no judgement on those involved. Also the editing of the new arrivals juxtaposed with scenes of people being gassed will naturally bring forth feelings of deep sorrow, which instantly makes the guards, carrying out their orders, the villain. The editing process goes as far as the use of slow motion shots, with children being murdered. As abhorrent as this is, it did not happen in slow motion.

Maybe it's the nature of the subject matter that no matter how the Germans are portrayed the sheer barbarousness of their actions are inconceivable to most reasonable people, so we hide behind the thought that they must have been monsters, when the reality is, that as human beings, they are the same as us.

In the body of the film, the acting is very naturalist, as befits the documentary style, however the choice of shots, obviously thought out and artificially created, destroys any feeling that as an audience you are there.

I have no ideas what the final product will look like as the review disc was presented as a boxed, time encoded, file, which has to be the basis of the review. With that in mind the picture was soft and unimpressive, with lots of compression artefacts evident. The disc contained no extras and the audio was German with burned in subtitles.

The film does have one central strength and that is how it places side by side the horrors of the camps with the mundane decisions that had to be taken to keep them running well.

Ultimately, it’s a brave experiment which ends up as neither drama nor documentary, but somewhere in-between.

5

Charles Packer