Raging Bull (1980)

There’s a scene in The Survivor where Nazi soldier and detestable dirtbag, Schneider (Billy Magnussen), shares his startlingly revealing thoughts on the war with inmate Harry Haft (Ben Foster): “[a]ll empires are built on the destruction of other people.  The Nazis weren’t the first to expel the Jews.  It’s been done by every Christian country over the last 1000 years…but you didn’t fight back, did you?”  

As a Jewish person well aware of the genocide that killed 6 million Jews and the impact that had on generations of survivors, this is a somewhat unsettling question to ponder.

The Survivor tells the unique story of Haft, a young Jewish man interned at the Auschwitz concentration camp at 16. Haft is confronted with a choice: either die like his fellow friends and family or fight fellow inmates to the death in a makeshift boxing ring set up by twisted Nazi officer, Schneider, for-profit and the soldiers’ sick pleasure. Cruelly enough, fighting back is exactly what Harry Haft has to do to survive the Nazi concentration camps. 

The film follows Harry through his struggles in the camps, told in flashback, up through the present day in Brooklyn, 1949, as he looks to make a buck as a boxer. He searches for Leah (Dar Zuzovski), his partner from before the war whom he lost contact and wishes to reunite with. Each time period is visually distinct. Harry’s time in Auschwitz is depicted in black & white, while ‘present-day’ Brooklyn is presented in a variety of warm, rich colors.  As a result of these choices, Brooklyn is vibrant and alive. In contrast, Harry's morbid past is shaded in black and white, distorted by shadows and conflict.  We see the concentration camp as nightmarish, a time of stark delineations, good versus evil,  and kill or be killed, with no room for ambiguity. Survival being the only thing that mattered.

There’s no hiding the horrors of war.  In one of the more disturbing scenes early in the film, Haft is seen dumping the dead bodies of Jewish inmates into fiery pits, a metaphorical burning inferno. From this inferno comes Lucifer in the guise of Schneider, offering Harry the chance to fight or suffer the same fate as those he buries. “I want you to become an entertainer,” the Schneider says to Harry.