Auschwitz review ★

Boll has been called the world’s worst film director by publications such as The New York Times, TIME Magazine and Entertainment Weekly (he isn’t, not by a long shot). The prospect of a director known for his showmanship and sensationalism tackling a topic as troubling and controversial as the Holocaust was seen by most commentators as something to approach with dread. Now that the finished film can be seen, much of this dread can be dispelled. Auschwitz is not quite the sensationalist trash that one might expect from viewing Boll’s genre output. In fact it is classed as a documentary, and only about half of the brief running time is given over to a dramatic reconstruction of a day’s events at a death camp (not “the” death camp, more on this in a minute). The other portion of the running time is given over to a series of interviews Boll has conducted with around half a dozen German school students that show their ignorance of the Holocaust (at least that’s the intention).

Boll claims that his intention with Auschwitz was to make the first film that shows the reality of a death camp. He calls Auschwitz a “meat factory”. The dramatic portion of the film shows one day in the camp. Jewish prisoners arrive by train, are processed and separated by German guards. Infants are shot. Children and adults are taken to showers that are of course actually gas chambers and coldly exterminated. After death, belongings and bodies are plundered for valuables. Finally the bodies are incinerated.

Boll takes his camera inside the gas chamber and the ovens in an attempt to lay bare the full horror of these events. Which probably has you wondering about the 15 certificate the film has been granted. Boll’s budget is simply not up to the task of capturing the horror of Auschwitz, in fact his budget would probably struggle to fund one episode of Dad’s Army. The director says that Auschwitz is the name of the Holocaust, and that his film is not a literal attempt to show the actuality of Auschwitz itself, but rather an impression of the industrialised process of genocide. In my opinion this seems like doublethink, to both explain the small scale of the operation depicted - while the real Auschwitz was vast, here it appears to consist of three scout huts - and lets him trade on the notoriety of the most infamous of Nazi death camps.

There’s no doubt that gas chamber and incineration scenes are depressing, but they are far from as visceral as one might expect. Boll’s version of the effects of Zyklon B gas poisoning is less harrowing and grotesque than that described in many shocking historical accounts. Victims splutter, cough, and slowly fall to the ground. Boll tries to tart this up with fast-cut editing, some slow motion, and a cheesy piano score.

The film fails to tackle the psychological complexities of how human beings could commit such atrocities. There is only an interminable HR discussion between two Nazis in which the dialogue goes some thing like this:

“Klaus can’t shoot the babies any more.”

“Oh. Damn.”

This is about as much depth as we are given.

Boll might claim that he is the first director to go inside the gas chamber and the ovens, but frankly this is a tasteless thing to do. And to do it in such a sanitised fashion compounds the basic wrongheadedness of the film.

Boll admits he originally intended to form a dramatic spine around one Jewish boy from arrival, to execution, to disposal. But in editing he found this melodramatic and so scrapped the idea. Unfortunately this appears to have left him with a limited amount of footage. In order to increase the running time to something commercially viable he has topped and tailed the film with the interview footage mentioned earlier. The interviews are as hamfisted as the rest of the film. Boll asks loaded and leading questions of a small group of teenagers who act as teenagers do and give blank and disinterested answers. A shocking condemnation of the ignorance of youth it is not. In fact a few of the youths seem reasonably well informed. One wonders what the point of all this is supposed to be. The interviews go on and on and on and illuminate nothing at all.

Boll has set himself an ambitious task of making a truly hard-hitting film about the Holocaust. I saw the film with a Q&A from the director, and I see no reason to doubt his commitment and sincerity. However his technical skills and resources are hugely wanting. Ultimately he has made a boring and pointless film on a hugely sensitive and important topic. What little outrage there is to be found here lies in Boll’s staggering hubris in attempting the endeavour in the first place.