Genocide (1982)

Calificación de los usuarios:

6.8/10   

Director:

Arnold Schwartzman

Escritores:

Martin Gilbert (written by) and
Marvin Hier (written by) ...

Fecha de Lanzamiento:

19 abril 1984 (Australia)

Género:

Documental | Historia

Plot Keywords:

Animated Sequence | Concentration Camp | 1930s | Holocaust | 1940s

Premios:

Won Oscar.

Comentarios de los usuarios:

Horrifying Documentary

Reparto

Elizabeth Taylor	...	Narrator (voice)
Orson Welles	...	Narrator (voice)
Simon Wiesenthal	...	Himself
listado alfabético del resto del reparto:
Neville Chamberlain	...	Himself (archive footage)
Winston Churchill	...	Himself (archive footage)
Dwight D. Eisenhower	...	Himself (archive footage)
Josef Goebbels	...	Himself (archive footage)
Hermann Göring	...	Himself - at Nuremberg Trials (archive footage)
Rudolf Hess	...	Himself (archive footage)
Heinrich Himmler	...	Himself (archive footage)
Adolf Hitler	...	Himself (archive footage)
Ralph Metcalfe	...	Himself - in 100m Final at the 1936 Olympics (archive footage)
Martinus Osendarp	...	Himself - in 100m Final at the 1936 Olympics (archive footage)
Jesse Owens	...	Himself (archive footage)
Pope Pius XII	...	Himself (archive footage) (as The Pope)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt	...	Himself (archive footage)
Joachim von Ribbentrop	...	Himself - at Nuremberg Trials (archive footage)

También conocida como:

Genocidio (Venezuela) [es]

Duración:

90 min

País:

USA

Idioma:

Inglés

Color:

Color

Sonido:

Mono

Clasificación:

New Zealand:R13 | Australia:PG

Locaciones de Filmación:

Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Mauthausen, Upper Austria, Austria

Compañía:

Simon Wiesenthal Center

Trivialidades:

The film was originally designed to be presented in a multi-screen format at a Los Angeles museum, with one 35mm projector, two 16mm projectors, and 18 slide projectors. Only after completion was it reformatted to be shown in standard film theaters.

Conexiones de Película:

Apareció en The 54th Annual Academy Awards (1982) (TV)

Horrifying Documentary

I gave this documentary a "10" because in my opinion there is no reason whatsoever for it to receive anything less. Along with the footage we have all pretty much come to expect (concentration camp survivors, footage of Hitler orating, and so on,) there are the wonderful narrations by Welles and Taylor.

I admit it has some flaws- Goering never made the "When I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my gun" remark, and the idea that Hitler was furious at the outcome of the 1936 Olympic Games (and refused to shake Jesse Owens's hand for racial reasons) have long been known to be false. Still, I think the rest of the material more than makes up for these minor gaffes.

The film gives us quite a lot of background of the conditions in which European Jews lived prior to the Hitlerian horror. We see life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, where the 1,000 year-old Ashkenazic culture still existed and where the "old ways" were honored; we also are reminded of how Jews had been fully assimilated into the cultures of Western Europe (particularly Germany, which interestingly enough had the most thoroughly mixed culture of all mainland European nations and among the highest educational standards in the world prior to Nazism,) and of their great contributions to science, literature, and the arts.

And it was all destroyed in a mere 12 years' time by legislation, the gun and the death camp. In a truly unsettling scene, we see Jews being shot to death in a pit by members of the Einsatzgruppen while the romantic song "Lili Marlene" (a favorite of German soldiers) plays and is sung slowly and softly in the background. This reminded me of the fact that one of Nazism's hallmarks was its insistence upon juxtaposing sentimental culture with indescribable brutality.

By 1945 the Ashkenazic civilization was a memory; it literally went up in smoke and ashes at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec and Treblinka, among other places.