It only lasts for a few seconds before dissolving to black and into the next scene. There is a scene where one of the characters throws her self onto an electrified fence the camera then moves in to frame her dead body with her arms up over wires. That connection between camera movement, meaning and morality was made most pointedly and concisely by another Cahiers critic Jacques Rivette writing on Gillo Pontecorvo's 1960 concentration-camp set film Kapo. Their observations applied primarily to fiction – although arguments could be made about documentary. This thing - film - was more than mere entertainment. Whichever way you want to inflect it – and I think there is a subtle difference – what the critics at Cahiers du Cinema articulated and argued over was the connection and impact of not only the way the camera moved but the whole aesthetic language of filmmaking to the ethical, social and political. In 1959, in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, critic and filmmaker Luc Moullet famously said that 'morality is a matter of tracking shots' which his colleague Jean Luc Godard equally famously inverted to 'tracking shots are a matter of morality.'

Have a read below - or alternatively listen to it in Podcast form - and let us know your thoughts on the subject via Twitter (Watershed) or (Mark). Our Cinema Curator Mark Cosgrove saw it in Cannes last year, and in advance of its release on Fri 29 April, has written a bit more about the film, and the morality of the creative choices inherent in making films that portray human atrocities. Son of Saul, a blistering Holocaust drama that picked up both the Oscar® and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language film, is the debut from Hungarian director László Nemes.

Son of saul film