“Schindler's List” by Steven Spielberg and “Night and Fog” by Alain Resnais both shed light on the horrific event of the Holocaust, but what What differentiates them from each other is the fact that both are depicted through different filmmaking styles, have different contexts, and serve different purposes. Spielberg's 1993 film is made to look like a documentary, which although it contains some of the actual footage of the Holocaust and portrays the true story behind the event, is in its true form, a fiction. The entire context of the film is through the perspective of Oskar Schindler, the over-glorification of that one German, who suddenly realizes that instead of exchanging the poor Jews as workers in his factory, he should save them from the wrath of the Nazis (even though he himself was part of the Nazi party). The romanticization of the entire plot is done so beautifully that the seriousness and sensitivity of the plot overwhelms the audience in a sea of emotions on the screen. By way of rhetoric, Resnais's 1956 documentary “Nuit et brouillard” simply describes the Holocaust in its real form. It features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek while describing the rise of Nazi ideology and the lives of prisoners in the camps. The film continues to alternate between past and present, with subtle use of monochrome and color. As Michel Bouquet recounts throughout the film, comparing the life of the Schutzstaffel to that of starving prisoners in ghettos and concentration camps. Bouquet addresses the sadism inflicted on condemned prisoners, including torture, scientific and medical "experiments", executions and rape, while the later part of the film depicts images of gas chambers and piles of bodies, describing how the Jews here hacked so inhuman death, and finally the last part of the film, which shows how the German country finds its liberation, the revelation of the "horror of the camps" and the investigation into who was responsible for them. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Spielberg tries his hand at 35mm black-and-white film, shot in Krakow, Poland, on a budget of $22 million, where some of the scenes were set among the remnants of the Krakow Ghetto. The use of Oskar Schindler's original factory and the reconstruction of the Plaszow labor camp in an area outside the city, along with the Auschwitz camp, are so perfectly crafted that no flaw can be found in its technical production. Spielberg's decision to keep the entire film in black and white, except the beginning, the end and the little girl in the red dress (the moment when Oskar really understands, after seeing the horror caused by the liquidation of the Jews). realize the terror of it all). Spielberg, through the character of the little girl, expects us to see this event as a “moral turning point” in Schindler's character. The red color of the little girl's coat proves successful in directing Oskar's attention towards the humanity of people treated like animals. Spielberg uses the power of color very well to "individualize horror". His desire to shoot the film as a documentary, leaving out the stylized ornamentation of cinematic trends of the current era and capturing the drama as if it were unfolding before the eyes of the viewer, is at its best, authentic, creating the emotional connection to the passed in ways that colorful films could not. It helps that Spielberg makes the fundamental point of this film, which is that everything shown in the film actually happened. Resnais's thirty-minute film, which featured no famous stars, “is generally recognized as oneof the great classics of cinema, and its restoration now allows us to fully appreciate this extraordinary encounter between cinema and history”. The idea behind creating a film about the concentration camps of the Holocaust was originally in sync with the exhibitions of the museum - "Resistance, Liberation, Deportation", which celebrated the tenth anniversary of the discovery of the camps, the result of years of government-sponsored work. historical research. The exhibition organizers continued to be deeply involved in the production of this documentary, along with drastic changes that occurred in the future with Anatole Dauman becoming the film's producer. What's even more important is the fact that Resnais ignored many of the documents and extra facts that historians wanted to include in the film. His use of only two types of images: the color exposure of the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek and the surrounding countryside in the magnificent hues of the autumn of 1955, and in contrast to it, the horrific black and white footage of the camps during the war. Therefore, a very simple structure was added to the film, where on the one hand, the reality of the present is represented through "vivid Eastman colors", with scenes of Auschwitz in its questionable "decadent ruins", captured without a beginning or a end composites. , deliberately following each shot with a steady rhythm. On the other hand, the camps were in black and white, through footage captured during the Holocaust, where hundreds of people were packed together beyond belief, with people suffering and dying at the hands of the Nazis. The main motif of Night and Fog, which transports the audience between the two worlds of normal society and the hell of the concentration camps, is Resnais's meticulous use of monochrome. After further research and study, it was discovered that for every colored shot, lasting on screen for approximately twenty seconds each, nearly five monochrome shots of four and a half seconds each are displayed in the same period of time, implementing the notion of how the staccato of terrifying images deny us the ability to contemplate the question with ease, as it leaves behind only the disturbing question of what connects both worlds. “The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed, Schindler's List was about six hundred people who don't. Stanley Kubrick is said to have told screenwriter Frederic Raphael in the late 1990s. The most obvious fact in the statement of Kubrick is that the event of the Holocaust is produced in a film from a perspective that takes just one fact and elaborates on it, rather than focusing on the entire event as a whole, in a very long time following the Holocaust. The film's economy of narrative and aesthetic pleasure consistently undermines its attempts to depict traumatic events cry, but at least it doesn't show the horrible reality that people saw Alain Resnais 'Nuit et brouillard', instead, focuses on the event as a whole while telling the story The dolly tracking Resnais's low-angle shot across the rickety railroad tracks taking the audience to the Auschwitz crematorium is practically simplified and augmented, although Resnais's use of Eastman colors is completely polished. But the important point to make here is that both of these films are not exactly the same in terms of their depiction of the Holocaust. Films have their own unique formal styles for comparing the past with the present. Resnais's cross-cuts among the post-war remains of the ghettos and concentration camps found in the present are in color and filmed.
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