This 31-minute documentary on the Nazi concentration camps is the only Holocaust movie I have seen that is a piece of art first and a Holocaust movie second. With images that pierce the heart and silence the tongue, Resnais has managed to make this film last much longer than the 31 minutes it takes to watch it.
There is one scene that goes ignored by critics and reviewers, but which I found to be the most haunting. In it, the music stops even though the camera continues moving down a hallway with bunks lining the wall. This is the moment when I felt the movie become real, when I felt like I was the one walking down this hallway, unable to take my eyes off of the bunks until I had reached the end of the hallway, when I could finally look away, at anything, the ground, even.
By mixing color footage taken from the abandoned camps ten years after the end of WWII with archival footage and still photos, we get a sense of the timelessness of these horrors. And that is where the film gets its power: this movie is not about the holocaust, but about the darkness in man. It merely uses the holocaust as an example and urges us not to be one of "those who pretend to believe that all of this happened in a given time and place, those who don't look around and hear the never-ending cries."IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0048434/