What found the review: Sam Mendes’ debut documentary has the power to change spectators forever | Television

WHat who found, the first documentary of the film and theatrical director Sam Mendes, is a short shock and Stark. The film directly combines two precious artifacts held at the Imperial War Museum in London: 35mm films, shot by sergeant Mike Lewis and sergeant Bill Lawrie of the British army film and photographic unit, before and during the release of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near the city of Celle in northern Germany in April 1945; and audio interviews provided by the Cameraman in the 80s. Lewis and Lawrie did not record the sound when they visited Belsen; The words that spoke years later are the only sounds we hear.

Lewis and Lawrie do not reach Belsen until halfway through the film’s execution time. Firstly, placed on generic archive movies, we hear how they have become photographers of the army and we have a flavor of their pre -war civil life. This is particularly relevant in the case of Lewis, a son of Jewish immigrants from Poland who looked dismayed in 1936 while the fascists held gatters in the country of origin adopted by his parents. “I couldn’t, like most English Jews, really believe in this of England,” he says. “But the world has started to suppose a more real form of those things they taught us.”

In April 1945, Lewis and Lawrie converge on cells, taking up the devastating destruction caused by the air bombing: those that were the roads are now distinguishable by identifying where the rubble are not piled up so high. There they meet a handful of Belsen prisoners who have already left the field and wandered, unreal, thin and stunned, but apparently no significantly more damaged than other displaced civilians. After hearing more “political prisoners” who have just been released nearby, Lewis thinks that this sounds like a less dangerous assignment of the first line: the term “political prisoners” strikes him as “a little vague and rather boring”.

For their own admission, Lewis and Lawrie are not prepared for what is inside the doors of the field, having only heard voices on what the Nazis have done to the Jews and other minorities. A bit like the spectators of this film that may have read and heard of the HolocaustBut that he has never met in movement of the single terror of Belsen, what Lewis and Lawrie are about to see will change them and will remain with them forever.

First of all, we are shown close -ups of corpses, swarmed mouths, who died far from peaceful. Subsequently, there are bodies, dozens of them, face up and on the face down in the open space among the buildings of the field, the camera that captures juxtapositions of the dead in the foreground and live behind.

So the photos that nobody can ever forget. Belsen contained thousands of other deaths that had to be moved from the load of trucks to mass municipalities. Lewis and Lawrie are there like these shocking figures because they are naked, more grotesque because hunger has robbed them of a recognizable human form-you can transport in deep 20-foot holes and then thrown, pushed or rolled up, their fragile limbs that twist innatenuctly while falling and joined the pile. Lawrie says: “While the days went, the bodies – they were mannequins, they were dolls. You lost contact. The reality went.”

These few minutes of the film, certainly among the most disturbing images ever shown on British TV, are more or less the entire piece: everything on both sides is context and, elsewhere, the austerity of the format – if Lewis and Lawrie do not explain something, is not explained – can make what they have found slightly disconcerting. The existing knowledge or post-video research is necessary to provide details, for example, on why the guards of the Nazi-Descript field with bitter English reserve of Lewis as “arrogant”-are still present or because the corpses were disposed of in that way or because the buildings were all bellies to the fire when the liberation was complete.

Often, however, men find the necessary words. “Why in Germany? What was the Germans who made them do?” Muse Lewis, before the ribbon ends and the last moments of the film play for empty silence. “The discovery came to me. It was a horrible discovery. (He was) not only the Germans: any breed was capable. Anyone, given the circumstances of Germany, could achieve this.”

Lewis also speaks lucidly about how, despite it was there in person, the camera formed a barrier between him and what he saw. “The reality of the places pushed me and protected me.” It is, of course, always the same for us, looking back from today’s security. But what they have found forces us to glimpse the clearest and most terrible truth.