Ithaca College

This paper examines the ways in which André Singer’s 2014 documentary Night Will Fall foregrounds the technological devices and representational strategies used to capture and authenticate the iconic images of the Nazi concentration camps. Thus, it reflects upon the formal and narrative processes that make the unimaginable recordable and the recordable documentable. By linking Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory work” to theories of moving image melodrama, this paper argues that Night Will Fall shifts focus from the aesthetic problems surrounding mimesis and memory, to the emotional landscape of Holocaust memorialization.