It offers - according to your view - either a further enrichment of understanding or a further demonstration, expressed with new intensity, that we still understand nothing. A coruscating movie with an original vision, it won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Son of Saul, from Hungary, is the latest film about the death camps to find an international audience. So has the empire of the Holocaust’s influence on cinema narrative: from the tormented inquests and chamber dramas of the 1960s ( Judgment at Nuremberg, The Pawnbroker), through to later films that queasily amped up the melodrama and psychodrama (Visconti’s The Damned, Cavani’s The Night Porter), to the 1990s and beyond, when comedy ( Life Is Beautiful), thriller ( Apt Pupil) and even Tarantino’s higher hokum ( Inglourious Basterds) have shared the acoustic of apocalypse with Schindler’s List and The Pianist. The number of Holocaust-themed movies released each decade has grown, not shrunk.

Paradox number two (which may, paradoxically, seem the opposite of number one): the most deeply disturbing human epoch still remembered by living survivors is being “remembered” more and more, the fewer of those survivors are among us. Too many minds have tilted, and are still tilting, at these satanic windmills. Paradox number one: the more movies we see, or the more history we read, the less we feel we understand. It’s a world of paradox worthy of Borges.

As the opinion mills grind and the hindsight factories whirr, we are confounded by choice. Today, if we still cannot grasp the Holocaust, it may be through having too many perspectives, not too few. That was the strategy - and surely the force - of Alain Resnais’s great Nuit et brouillard, his 1955 documentary musing on the nightmare of Auschwitz. They could say, “How do you speak about the unspeakable or the never-spoken-of-before?” The fittest response for early films, born in the decade after war, was just to show and gaze. Those who first stumbled on the horrors of the death camps could declare a powerlessness before the unprecedented. If the helplessness is the same, though, the reasons for it have changed and fluctuated. How are we to “remember” a reality we cannot grasp or fully understand, even now, try as we may? Yet still we on Planet Cinema, and Planet Earth, have no answer to the most enduring question prompted by the Holocaust. From The Pawnbroker to The Pianist from Shoah to Schindler’s List to Son of Saul. For 70 years the titles have tumbled forth.

Son of saul movie times