Auschwitz-Birkenau became a postwar
synonym for industrialized genocide, described, for example, as “the capital of
the Holocaust.” There is an interesting shift in the visual conventions of
rendering the operation of the camp, its history and moral import. Soviet and
Polish filmmakers contributed to the conceptualization of the
“:concentrationary universe” and industrial genocide as a modernist event, and
they established cinematographic conventions of Holocaust documentary. Films
discussed span the period from the liberation of the camp through the 1960s,
and include liberation footage recorded by the Red Army as well as Polish Film
Chronicle, Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955), Andrzej Brzozowski's Archeology
(1967) and Tadeusz Jaworski's I was a Kapo (1963). This selection sheds
light on the aesthetic choices and respective film genres: newsreel,
posttraumatic film, scientific film, and testimony.