Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) poster & wallpaper

Michel Bouquet

This short is one of the most vivid depictions of the horrors of Nazi Concentration Camps. Filmed in 1955 at several concentration camps in Poland, the film combines new color and black and white foot...( read more  read more... )age with black and white newsreels, footage shot by the victorious allies, and stills, to tell the story not only of the camps, but to portray the horror of man's brutal inhumanity.

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Unrated, 31 min.

Directed by: Alain Resnais

Release Date: January 1, 1955

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DVD Release Date: June 24, 2003

Stats: 357 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (357)

  • columbiatch
    June 1, 2009
    columbiatch
    The voiceover here is quite interesting, while the tone is strictly detached and committed to the facts about the concentration camps occasional glimpses of subjectivity and self-reflexivity reveals itself. The whole contextualizing the holocaust in terms of collective memory was...( read more) a good choice as well.
  • flixsterman
    April 28, 2009
    flixsterman
    Powerful, gruesome documentary footage of Nazi concentration camps. A hard but necessary watch, should be required viewing for students the world over.
  • kenstachnik
    September 16, 2008
    kenstachnik
    It's brilliant, but I can't say I really liked it. Probably the roughest film I've ever seen. Not for the faint of heart.
  • bort16
    June 8, 2008
    bort16
    It is remarkable to view Alain Resnais?s documentary ?Night and Fog? today to see find that its groundbreaking form is still groundbreaking. Also remarkable is that the film pulls no punches, and censors nothing ? at least on the DVD version. When the film was originally releas...( read more)ed, it contained a shot that had been censored in post production. The still shot showed the profile of French Gendarmes in the distance ? the French government ordered the image be blurred out. However, upon its release by the criterion collection on dvd, the image was restored to show that the Vichy government may very have been involved in the running of the camps. Nevertheless, without the subtle retouch, the film loses none of its obvious power. Resnais mixes archive footage and photography of the death camp and its goings on, with color footage of the camps as the stood at the time of filming. The camp looks more or less like it remains today, starkly haunting. The black and white archive footage is disturbing and borderline nauseating at times. While the gruesome photographic portraits of the Holocaust remain abundant and paraded as a reminder that this can happen ?never again? (something which has sadly failed entirely to catch on in reality), rarely do you see the horror in the extent that Resnais showed in 1955. Flesh, close-ups of bulldozed bodies, and decapitated bodies with their heads neatly placed in a basket in real time. It remains an oddity however to ponder what is more disturbing ? the gruesome and horrifying archive footage, or empty and colour filled footage of the abandoned death camps, with the memory of where bodies one laid piled one on the other, where humans were treated worse than most unwanted of rodents.
    I mentioned the style of the documentary, and suggested that it today remains unique. It?s shot in montage, the modern footage with long slow tracking shots. A voice narrates overtop of often bizarre music ? bizarre because it often feels like it belongs to another film. Despite that, it?s impossible to imagine the film without that music to evoke its sense of ghastly eeriness. Those familiar with Resnais?s other films with recognize this characteristic style. He used it again with such effect particularly in the opening of Hiroshima Mon Amour and throughout Last Year at Marienbad.
    The documentary is short ? only about 30 minutes ? but it packs in a wealth of information, delivering a gutshot lesson on man?s inhumanity to his fellow man. Resnais chose not to make this a film simply about the Jewish Holocaust, but one about the Holocaust in its entirety. This is evidenced by the final death toll given towards the end of the doc, 9 million (accounting for Jews, as well as the 5 million gypsies, homosexuals, and other minorities that made up the other half of Hitler?s final solution). It?s also interesting to note the lesson of the film. At a time when the Holocaust was still in a phase suggesting it was an anomaly, something which could never happen again because it simply wouldn?t happen again (for more on this see Jeffrey C Alexander?s paper on the historical narratives of the Holocaust ? available through most academic online hosts), Resnais warns us to be weary of where our next executioners will come from, with their faces the same as ours. Resnais recognized that the Holocaust was not simply an anomaly, but that it could happen again, and indeed seems to suggest that it would happen again. How unfortunate that that long heralded call of ?never again? has gone by the wayside, and how unfortunate that Resnais seemingly had the right idea all along.
  • nuheart
    January 6, 2007
    nuheart
    Really unexceptional Woody Allen movie.
  • DeadNotSleeping
    November 27, 2009
    DeadNotSleeping
    Don't think I could.
  • speedymymy
    November 18, 2009
    speedymymy
    C'est le film le plus éprouvant que j'ai vu. Montre l'horreur que peuvent faire subir des hommes à d'autres hommes. Montre la réalité. Ces images me hantent et ont transformé ma perception des êtres humains.
  • Anaconda728873
    October 27, 2009
    Anaconda728873
    Some new images from the Holocaust I hadn't seen before...and yeah, it's obviously really depressing seeing people being treated in that manner. Gruesome, depressing, but necessary I suppose for historical knowledge.
  • caffeinatedalex
    September 23, 2009
    caffeinatedalex
    Lyrical films are often a mixed bag. It's not easy to compile a work of cinema that relies most heavily on the image and its relation and metaphor with itself. Night and Fog is an interesting idea in the lyrical sense. Made in 1955, it's goal was to reflect on the atrocities o...( read more)f World War 2 committed through concentration camps by placing images of the camps 10 years after their abandonment in contrast with archival images of the camps, and footage that displayed their inhumanities. It sounds interesting enough. And with a running time of 32 minutes it seems like the type of thing that can stay the course long enough to be hard-hitting and poignant. Little can be said of the film before mentioning that it is wonderfully photographed and wonderfully compiled. The modern day footage of the concentration camps portray inhuman pits with vibrant colors and ghostly absences. The lack of soul in any of the buildings or landscapes resonate through the viewer, and the impact is definitely achieved. Likewise, the stock footage is picked wisely, to display the most haunting and disgusting atrocities. Images of mountains of hair and shoes, as well as emaciated bodies both living and dead, create an eerie and jarring feel. The problem is that the two are communicated poorly. The device of putting the images in talks with each other does little past emphasizing that it's easy to look past the history of a place at first glance. And even that message is poorly conveyed by the embarrassingly pretentious and poorly written narration. Unmistakably French, it waxes poetic to an obnoxious degree, giving the viewer almost no time to dwell in the horrors of the film, and constantly distracting with the kind of poetry one would expect to be displayed in a 9th grade American creative writing class. When put together with the ill-fitting and outdated score, the film becomes ineffective and impotent. The idea of Night and Fog is a noble and powerful one, but the execution is too soaked in its own pretension to create a piece as haunting and effective as the subject matter deserves.
  • rhadynascimento
    August 25, 2009
    rhadynascimento
    There's no such thing as "enough films about the Holocaust".

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  • Alain Resnais directed what famous Holocaust documentary?   Answer »
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