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Plot:
Though only a short subject, this groundbreaking documentary remains one of the most influential and powerful explorations of the Holocaust ever made. Director Alain Resnais bluntly presents an indi...( read more 
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Recent Reviews
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MCT:May 1, 2008Fantastic and hard-hitting documentary. Its detached tone only serves to highlight the harrowing nature of the source material. some frighteningly graphic stock footage.
chilling. -
MCT:April 30, 2008
"Night and Fog" is undeniably the most important movie ever to be produced about WWII. Free from the pretention of character development conjuring false empathy, it is dead serious as it switches back and forth from footage shot 10 years after the war when concentration camps were abandond and with archaic footage taken during that grim section of history. Lasting only 20 minutes, Resnais' film is free from blemish of commercial aspirations, focusing on facts that finds horror in reality while leaving enough space for imagination to translate the nausiating details. It is curious how some people deny the Holocaust ever existed, as in this film alone, the viewer will definitely be flooded with facts, unaltered to intentionally pull any emotional punches, but presented as they are. Film scholars avoid themselves from labeling this film as a documentary, as they do have a point, the archaic footage weren't recorded to film reality as such, but film the concentration camps as they see them. Just imagine, if it was already *that* grim from theirs, what about the inmates' perspective? This is a film that will be as poignant now, tomorrow and eternity.
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MCT:March 29, 2008the first documentary about Nazism ever made, contains the most shocking images of the Holocaust I've ever seen.
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MCT:March 19, 2008
Not for the faint of heart. This is probably the best documentary on the nazi concentration camps during WW2. A big influence on Schindler's List.
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Perhaps the most powerful non-fiction Holocaust film ever made, Alain Resnais' 'Night and Fog' is a truly shocking glimpse into the horrors of the Jewish concentration camps of World War Two. Released just ten years after the liberation of the camps, with the memories of the Holocaust still frighteningly raw, the film combines black-and-white archival footage and still images with colour footage filmed at the decaying Auschwitz site in 1955. What results is a truly horrifying account, its power undiminished by time or the release of countless other Holocaust pictures over the years. Whilst 'Schindler's List' was a meticulously-crafted drama, and 'La Vita è bella' made us cry through tears, and 'The Pianist' was a haunting tale of survival, 'Night and Fog' is comprised of real-life archival footage. Those decaying, emaciated bodies are not the bodies of actors or dummies; they are the bodies of real people. The fear and confusion evident upon those faces is not a triumph of stellar acting, but the result of cruelly forcing a human being to endure horrors more terrible than we can ever imagine.
The director of this film knows how indescribable the horrors of the Holocaust are. The narrator, Michel Bouquet, often speaks with an air of skepticism or doubt, often remarking "(it is) useless to describe what went on in these cells," or, "words are insufficient," or "no description, no picture can reveal their true dimension." The archive footage is used mainly to speak for itself, supplemented by Bouquet's astringent, matter-of-fact narration. According to the director, Bouquet was initially instructed to narrate using a "neutral tone," though his voice does contain almost a hint of irony, as if nothing he could ever say would ever fully describe the horrors of the Holocaust.
Certain images cling to the mind long after the half-hour film has concluded. Whilst in any dramatised fictional film, such images might be considered beautifully poignant (Spielberg's little girl in the red coat, perhaps?), the images in 'Night and Fog' could more accurately be described as a nightmare. Skeletal human forms lay motionless on crowded bunk beds; a mammoth pile of woman's hair waits to be manufactured into cloth; thousands of rotting bodies are bulldozed into a burial pit. By contrasting the repulsion of these images with the tranquil silence of the modern colour footage, Resnais reinforces his assertion that today it is effectively impossible to imagine what these unfortunate detainees were forced to endure.
The title of the film ('Nuit et Brouillard'), from the German 'Nacht und Nebel,' was taken from the title of the memoirs of the film's writer, Jean Cayrol. After escaping from the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, Cayrol released 'Poèmes de la nuit et brouillard' in 1946. This title itself refers to Nacht und Nebel, a directive of Adolf Hitler on December 7 1941, which resulted in the kidnapping and disappearance of many political activists throughout Nazi Germany's occupied territories.
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