The railroad tracks leading into the camp
Resnais uses a lot of techniques within this film, he uses real footage from the camps and photographic stills - along with his footage of the same places within the camps post-war.
Resnais continues with similar filming techniques that the original footage contained. The original footage had a lot of panning from left to right and up and down, which you can see in the footage of individuals beginning to file into the first train to take them to the concentration camps. People are being herded inside of the train cars as the camera flits from left to right, and sometimes concentrating on specific people - like a Jewish man pushing a cart where his wife is sitting and a circle of Nazi soldiers fanning out to keep them in line. Resnais uses similar techniques when he is outside of the buildings (he visits the 'hospital', the crematorium, the beds, and the latrines. When he is outside of the building he pans as he walks from one side of the building to the next, when inside he pans from a close up of a subject (the latrines or beds for example), and then pans out to show the viewer the rest of the room. Resnais concentrates a lot on using windows and doors, to show him entering and exiting a space fluidly. He does this when he enters the "showers" he pans in from a window to the ceiling and then stops at a dirty corner and then begins showing stills of individuals who died in these conditions.
Soldiers standing outside of the train
Each time he enters a space he makes a comparison between the real footage, and what it presently looks like. Especially the still ness and how ordinary everything appears to be from the exterior. After he shows the chambers, he flashes to his own footage and comments on how people could easily mistake it for a work house, and how now-a-days it is a tourist attraction where people take photos in front of it.
Resnais plays around with color quite a bit in this film, he begins with color and then flashes to black and white. The color represents his own footage of the aftermath, and the black and white represents the original footage (for the most part) as well as, the photographic stills he uses within the film. I think that by using color footage for the aftermath, he is expressing just how ordinary the place appears and how real all of this truly is.
Resnais uses the stills to further express the circumstances of the time, and also to help convey his point further. Resnais is very concerned with how easily the holocaust occurred and makes a few comments about how people who died there lead ordinary lives up till that point- and how quickly everything changed. He uses stills to further explore each scene, ranging from the beginning to the end of the concentration camps. For example: he uses real footage of individuals unknowingly filing into the trains that majority will die inside of, without ever reaching their destination. He ends the footage with an aerial shot of the train filing into the distance, and then flashes to stills of the dead bodies falling out of train cars and piled on top of one another.He uses still to better explain situations that the footage fails to complete.
Resnais is very selective about the real footage he uses within this film, each segment is very important to convey the time. He begins by showing footage of Hitler addressing the crowds of Nazi's and German peoples, people are throwing their hands in the air as Nazi's are marching. The next segment he uses is of people filing into the trains heading to the camps, it skips and he uses real footage of: people being experimented on within the 'hospitals', of people dying in the hospital beds, a plow pushing piles of dead bodies into mass graves, the careful precise way the prisoners ate- when they ate, the prisoners carrying dead bodies to the mass graves, and them standing in masses close to the electric fences waiting in dirty blankets at the end of the war. All of these situations are incredibly important, and when shown real footage of they have a really powerful emotional reaction on the viewer.
They carry friends who had become too week, and share food among one another
Them waiting
The dialogue is in French with English subtitles as Michel Bouquet narrates the situations, when real audio is not accompanied by the footage. Very real audio is used, but he does include some of Hitler's audio when he is speaking to the German peoples.
Resnais does use sound, but it is all very soft classical sounding, ranging from flutes, and trumpets to violins.
The lighting is very natural when Resnais is filming, he uses the natural light to film the exterior of the surroundings and also uses the light that shines into the buildings when he films indoors.
The film closes with a pan of a collapsed building as Michel begins asking, if the people directly involved with the Holocaust deny responsibility for what happened, then who is left responsible? Not just that, but that these people are able to walk away from this situation without suffering. Resnais wants the viewer to remember the ease with which the Holocaust began and to realize that we must accept and remember the reality of what happened.
"Nine million dead haunt the countryside
Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower
To warn of the arrival of our new executioners?
Are their faces really different from our own?"
-Michel Bouquet
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