Night and Fog

The first time I saw Night and Fog, Alain Resnais' brief but powerful documentary on the Nazi concentration camps, was in a film class in college. The professor had first shown Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film celebrating Hitler. The professor said he couldn't show that film without following with Night and Fog.

Made in 1955, the film is just over a half-hour long. It intersperses color film of the camps as they were then--abandoned, overgrown with weeds, haunted--with black and white footage taken during the horrors that took place there. It's not a documentary of information as much as images.

And of course the images sear the psyche. Emaciated bodies, corpses being bulldozed into pits, a basket of severed heads, the phosphorus burn wound of a prisoner being experimented on, the fingernail scratchings in the concrete of the ceiling of the gas chamber.

There are many films, both documentary and narrative, about the Holocaust, but this one may be the most direct and powerful. In addition to the indelible images is a gripping narration written by Jean Cayrol. He closes the film with this passage, which I find to both moving and a warning:

"The crematorium is no longer in use. The devices of the Nazis are out of date. Nine million dead haunt this landscape. Who is on the lookout from this strange tower to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own? Somewhere among us, there are lucky Kapos, reinstated officers, and unknown informers. There are those who refused to believe this, or believed it only from time to time. And there are those of us who sincerely look upon the ruins today, as if the old concentration camp monster were dead and buried beneath them. Those who pretend to take hope again as the image fades, as though there were a cure for the plague of these camps. Those of us who pretend to believe that all this happened only once, at a certain time and in a certain place, and those who refuse to see, who do not hear the cry to the end of humanity."