Broken Silence (2002)

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General		Extras
Category	Documentary	Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	2002
Running Time	282:50 (Case: 280)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered Dual Disc Set	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4,5	Directed By	Pavel Chukhraj Vojtech Jasny Luis Puenzo János Szász
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	None Given
Case	?
RPI	$34.95	Music	Andrés Goldstein Daniel Tarrab Hugo Primero

    While making Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg realised that the survivors of the Holocaust were a precious resource in themselves, and that their experiences needed to be preserved in some form. In 1994 he established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organisation whose charter was to record on video the testimonies of 50,000 Holocaust survivors for posterity, as a teaching resource as well as an historical one. To date some 52,000 testimonies have been recorded in 57 countries around the world.

    To increase awareness of the Holocaust and to use the material they had collected in a positive way, the Foundation commissioned a series of five films from international film-makers. The charter for each of these directors was to produce an hour-long documentary using pre-recorded testimonies to show the impact of the Holocaust on citizen of their countries.

    There is already a sea of material available on the Holocaust in film, video and print. An Israeli Foreign Minister is reported to have said "there's no business like Shoah business". To capture attention these days, any new material needs to be controversial, different or of very high quality. These documentaries are not especially controversial, and some are somewhat uneven and not as good as they should have been. The material presented is interesting and eye-opening. The one issue I have is that because of the nature of the project, all of the testimonies are accepted at face value without any critical appraisal. The testimonies were recorded over 50 years after the events described, and the memories of the survivors may be faulty, confused or the events embroidered unintentionally over the passing years. These testimonies need to be seen as merely one element of the history of the Holocaust, in combination with the documentary, visual, physical and forensic evidence available, as well as eyewitness accounts from the time.

    The contributions from Poland, Russia and the former Czech Republic are the best of the bunch here. All of these films contain graphic and confronting material.

algunos que vivieron / Some Who Lived (55:29)

    The first film in the set is by the Argentinian director Luis Puenzo, whose film The Official Story won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1985. That film was an examination of the impact of the military junta on the lives of an upper middle class family. In Some Who Lived, Puenzo takes a chronological approach to the testimonies of a number of Holocaust survivors who end up in Argentina, a country that also harboured fugitive Nazis. Archival footage is used to illustrate the film so that it is not just a series of talking heads, but it comes across as being just another Holocaust documentary, and Puenzo's attempts to draw parallels with the Argentinean regime of Juan Perón come across as clumsy.

A Holocaust Szemei / Eyes of the Holocaust (56:56)

    The parents of Hungarian director Janos Szasz were Holocaust survivors themselves. His film has an awkward framing device of a girl reading from a dictionary of Holocaust-related terms. Hungary was an ally of Germany during World War II, and while Jews were discriminated against by the Hungarian regime, the mass killings did not begin until the Germans entered Hungary in 1943 while retreating from defeat in the Soviet Union. The survivors here describe the slow erosion of their lives followed by panic when the Nazis took over and attempted to liquidate the Hungarian population.

Children From the Abyss (56:04)

    Russian director Pavel Chukraj effectively shows the horror of the Nazi invasion of Russia, with the mass killings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen after the Wehrmacht had moved further into the country. Rather than deport the Jews to concentration camps, the SS forced them to dig mass graves and simply shot or burned them on the spot. At Babi Yar, the Germans reduced the population of 150,000 Jews from Kiev down to 20 within a matter of months. Chukraj uses the testimonies of survivors who were children at the time of the atrocities, some of whom managed to survive the Babi Yar massacre, and this film is one of the best in this series.

Pamiętam / I Remember (58:08)

    This film is by the veteran Polish director Andrzej Wajda whose credentials include several war-themed films and Korsczak, the true story of a orphanage director who went with the children in his orphanage to the gas chamber. Unlike the other films in this series, Wajda does not use archival footage at all. This film is in black and white and Wajda counterpoints the testimonies with images of young people taking part in the annual March of the Years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz (Oswiecim). Instead of short extracts from multiple testimonies, Wajda uses the stories of only four survivors, who describe their stories in detail. Most remarkable of these are David Efrati, whose tales of survival after escaping from the Warsaw ghetto are extraordinary, and Henryk Mandelbaum, who was forced to work in the crematorium in Auschwitz.

Peklo na Zemi / Hell On Earth (56:13)

    The Czech director Vojtech Jasny saw his father deported to Auschwitz. He became a partisan and fought against the Germans until the liberation. This film tells of inhabitants of the model camp built at Terezin (Theresienstadt), at least some of whom was enlisted to help bury the victims of the massacre at nearby Lidice.

    This is a two disc set with the first three films on disc one. Annoyingly, there are no chapter cues within each film.

Video

    The films are presented in the original aspect ratio of 1.33:1, being made for television, and are not 16x9 enhanced.

    The films are as sharp as you would expect them to be given that the testimonies were shot on video. Some of the video is grainy and lacking in detail, though the footage on Hell On Earth is nice and sharp, probably being recorded more recently. In I Remember, the decision to show everything in black and white means that the colour has been turned down on the testimony footage, which accentuates the graininess of the footage.

    Shadow detail is satisfactory, given that very little of the material was shot in low light levels. Colour is realistic but not exceptional, though you would not be watching this material for the visual quality. There is little in the way of any introduced artefacts, apart from some very mild aliasing from time to time.

    A lot of archival material is included in this series, including film footage and old photographs, and it is shown as it was found, without restoration. Dirt, scratches and other damage is present. As it was the decision of the film-makers to use this footage as we see it, this is not something one can quibble about.

    Both discs are dual layered discs, with no layer changes present, as programmes are recorded completely on one layer or another.

    Optional subtitles are provided in ten languages including English with yellow lettering. The subtitles are very well done with one small issue: names of the survivors are flashed on the screen as subtitles in all episodes but I Remember, and sometimes these names are displayed too briefly to read.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is a single audio track in Dolby Digital 2.0. Each documentary is presented in the native language of the country involved.

    Dialogue is clear and I expect will be easy to understand for speakers of these languages.

    Music is by various composers. Wojciech Kilar produced some original music for I Remember, as has Aleksei Rybnikov for Children From The Abyss whilst in other films selections from classical works are used. The music is well recorded and generally well chosen.

    Some surround encoding is present, which sounds acceptable when using Dolby Pro Logic, though surround sound is not really necessary for this material.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Trailer (2:51)

    A television trailer for the series, which gives a good picture of what it is about. It has the same video and audio quality as the main programme. This is included on disc one.

    This series has been released in Region 1. No reviews are available as yet, but from vendor sites it appears that the series is presented on a single flipper disc rather than two discs as in Region 4. In the absence of any concrete information, I would have to rate this a draw.

    A sometimes harrowing, sometimes moving series of documentaries, this forms a substantial addition to the library of Holocaust material.

    The video quality is good.

    The audio quality is very good.

    The extras do not amount to much, but with nearly five hours of material here, that is not a big deal.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall