123: Night and Fog (a.k.a. Nuit et Brouillard)

            How does one review a holocaust documentary? It would be pointless to describe images or the events covered as both are well-known and horrific.  It should suffice to divulge a few facts.  The rest should be up to each viewer. 

            Night and Fog (1955) was one of the first projects ever to cover the holocaust.  The stock footage shown was compiled from different army units who liberated the concentration camps, but I don’t know if it had been assembled into any larger project prior to this work by Alain Resnais.  He went on to prominence with seminal works of the European film movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s such as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and I suspect this picture remains seen largely because of that success.  Still, this is a good picture in its own right, surpassing those two works in many ways.  Legend has it that Francois Truffaut believed this documentary short to be the greatest film ever made.  It was banned from exhibition at Cannes due to its potential to offend German participants, but ironically lobbied for by the director of the Berlin Film Festival.

            To a contemporary audience, the images presented here will likely not be new.  Concentration camp footage has made its way into many films since.  However, they are put together here in a way that foreshadows the much lengthier Shoah (1985), juxtaposing stock footage with images taken ten years later of the now decaying camps.  What’s strange, and what the narrator points out, is how peaceful these buildings now seem to be.  Once they held the dead and the dying.  Now they are altogether empty.  They serve as reminders of what the 1001 text calls “man’s inhumanity to man.” 

            I’ve visited one of the sites shown in the film.  When I was seventeen I went to Europe with a tour group that stopped at Dachau, just outside of Munich.  There is an indescribable feeling that comes from walking those grounds and staring into the ovens that cremated tens of thousands of bodies.  Sixty five years and half a world away, the holocaust can seem so distant.  The pictures and films shown in high school classrooms don’t seem real until you stand in the place where they were taken.  As Night and Fog displays, they are peaceful grounds now; hallowed as markers of a past best not forgotten.  This seems to be the point of Resnais picture.  These are not things to be lost to the past.  He points his finger at no one in particular, instead choosing to imply that most involved in the camps were cogs in the bureaucracy of the “final solution.”

            Still, how could so many have turned a blind eye?  Populations were aware of these structures, and had to have noticed the trains and trucks, packed to capacity, headed in their direction.  It’s a testament to the power of deniability that 6 million lives vanished, as Himmler said, “into the night and fog.”  

Language: French

Runtime: 32 Minutes

Available from Netflix.com

Grade: 3 Hats Off