Night Will Fall
Director: Andre Singer
Talent: Alfred Hitchcock, Sidney Bernstein
Release Date: 19th September 2014
The press screening for Holocaust documentary Night Will Fall was hampered by a technical difficulty. The film was made to be shown at 25 frames per second, while our projector was running at 24. Thus, the film’s audio became increasingly out of sync with the video content, at a rate of approximately 1/25th of a second per second. Other reviewers decided that the images spoke loudly enough and continued to watch the malfunctioning print, but I left ten minutes in. In a way, and to be ungenerous about it, that acceptance of those technical difficulties spoke of a wider historical trend, I think: the processing of genocide, and of fascism, out of sync with analytical rigour, divorced from a practicable understanding of how and why they took place. That they continue to do so is a testament to this learned, cultural blindness. Our recent history is a tragic expression of it.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
