Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955): France

Reviewed by Byron Potau.  Viewed on DVD.

The Holocaust has since been explored in other documentaries and in fictional films, but Alain Resnais’ 1955 documentary, Night and Fog, was one of the earliest, and finest, attempts to make sense of the senselessness that occurred in the Nazi concentration camps.

Mixing new color footage of the deserted camps, archival footage, and still photographs, Resnais takes us on a journey through the concentration camps that stand shunned, despised, and ignored–relics too horrible to contemplate.  Narrated by writer Jean Cayrol, a camp survivor himself, we are informed of the daily torment, suffering and struggle of the Jews, and the malicious, stupefying, and disturbing inhumanity of the Nazis.  The film progresses from early deportation to the camps, role calls, early humiliations, Nazi procedures, daily struggles, various atrocities, and finally, extermination.

An insightful and sobering film, it brings you face to face with the atrocities that were committed  so matter of factly, and on a daily basis, by the Nazis.  Obviously filled with disturbing images which include many of the dead and dying, it is not an easy viewing experience, as it stirs strong feelings of sympathy, anger, disgust and many more.  The strength of the film is that it does not simply rely on the fact of millions of Jews murdered, but takes us through detailed experience of their struggles, fears, and suffering through attention to the smaller details in the footage and the photographs, descriptions of the experiences such as the false sense of a hospital portrayed by the Nazis where the sick were unnecessarily operated on and used for experiments.   These scenes and many others work to bring to light the realities of what haunts these abandoned camps.  Resnais’ film is a powerful study of what happened and, if we ignore it, what could someday happen again.