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KZ [2005] [DVD]

Rated: Suitable for 12 years and over | Format: DVD
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
Price: £2.73
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Product details

  • Format: PAL
  • Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 1.78:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: 12
  • Studio: Pias UK
  • DVD Release Date: 12 Oct 2006
  • Run Time: 98 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B000H5V9Q2
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 63,092 in Film & TV (See Top 100 in Film & TV)

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Reviews

Product Description

In the beautiful landscape of Upper Austria, lies the picturesque town Mauthausen. A mere stones throw from the town's centre you will find a place of nightmares, where thousands upon thousands of people from over 30 nations were tortured and murdered. This is the site of a former KZ - German short for concentration camp - a place that today attracts busloads of tourists from all over the world each day.

Rex Bloomstein's film KZ, records unflinchingly the modern everyday lives of Mauthausens' citizens and the constant flow of visitors that flock to the former camp. KZ is successful in highlighting the lasting legacy and impact of evil on individuals of all generations, nationalities and religions, and offers a glimpse into the recent phenomenon of `Holocaust tourism'.

Giggling school-groups are quickly silenced as they enter the camp and hear unimaginable stories of the atrocities that were committed inside. Around Mauthausen residents talk proudly of their `idyllic' town and their frustration of the stigma attached to living there. Some older ladies reminisce about their `beautiful' weddings to handsome former SS guards, others recount chilling childhood memories; the smell of burning bodies over Mauthausen, the piles of corpses in the streets.

Stripped of the usual documentary filmmaking devises - archive footage, music, commentary, reconstructions, stills, historians, testimonies from survivors - KZ offers a dramatically different and startlingly powerful exploration of a difficult and oft-explored subject, and is at once a timeless and contemporary film. It will shake you to the core.

Review

"More revealing and effective than a standard Holocaust documentary - a powerfully simple film" -- Guardian Guide

"Really a film about the educational process itself" - -- The Times Educational Supplement

`In its deceptively calm way, KZ is the year's most fascinating documentary'. -- The Independent on Sunday
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting 26 Aug 2006
By Mick Maroon
Format:DVD
Just saw this at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Eschewing the contemporary fashions of archive footage and dramatisation this film lets the camera follow the tours and their guides around Mauthausen. There are no shocking visuals but plenty of shocking material. The facial expressions of visitors - all caught beautifully - capture their emerging realisation of just how big, how extensive, how murderous and amoral the KZ system (and the NS system behind it) actually was. The relationship of local Austrians to the KZ is deeply complex - sometimes moving, sometimes shockingly callous. The scenes with the tour guides themselves are particularly moving.

There are no easy or glib answers in this film, only penetrating quations and a quiet and courageous humanity. I cannot praise this film too highly - it takes a different kind of look at the horrors of the Third Reich, one that deepens our understanding of the past forces us to look into our own consciences in the present.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Still wondering how best to use this film as a teacher... 28 Jan 2007
By Josephine
Format:DVD
I viewed this film today in a cinema, where it was being screened for Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK. In many ways it's uncinematic - though some still images around the KZ complex linger terribly in the mind - and the hand held footage almost makes one feel sick, until you get to the gas chamber, in particular, and such early quibbles are made to look utterly out of place.

I was profoundly moved, in particular, by the two tour guards who feature most prominently - one older man with a self-confessed 3rd Reich 'addiction' who questions the price he pays for his work, until he sees a swastika scratched into the wall of the gas chamber, in place of a memorial photograph torn away by some tourist as a grisly souvenir - and one much younger, whose motivation and commitment perplexed me, until at the end questioning reveals that he is serving time at the KZ as an alternative to compulsory military service, and that his grandfather, to his stoic and deeply human comprehension if not acceptance, was an SS officer himself.

As a teacher I am not sure how to best use this, or with which classes. Some of the 'processing' descriptions are truly stomach-churning and would probably require parental viewing consent. Yet in terms of lessons to learn, the continuing need for these lessons, and the sensitivity required in teaching 20th century German history - that is, sensitivity towards all who survive from whichever side of the experience - it offers huge possibilities.

Perhaps not an easy Sunday morning's viewing, but a necessary one.
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5.0 out of 5 stars A Pretty Camp 11 Mar 2013
By Ascylto
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
Having visited Mauthausen, I can attest to the veracity of this DVD. It is a scary place. I have had the film on my phone and computer for years so I was pleased to see the DVD available at Amazon. Strangely, no public transport is available to visit the camp, one has to either walk or get private transport! How odd! There is a train from Vienna to Mauthausen but thereafter it's taxi. Alas, the largest 'statue' is a Jewish Menorah whereas the camp was noticeable for having children and non-Jews for much of its exisence (Jews probably went straight to Auschwitz). I wish they hadn't changed a room for the visit of Pope John Paul II, they have a picture of St Maximilian Kolbe there and he wasn't even at Mauthausen. It's odd to think that such atrocities were committed in what is, after all, a good looking KZ. Odd to think the Commandant could have been seen as a 'good egg' when he must have been a cruel and treacherous man. I remain bemused at a small 'field' of heads on the way to M. (the explanatory note had been bleached) - can anyone help?
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