Night and Fog (1955)

January 5, 2024 admin Comments 1 comment

[Note: The following review is of a non-Peary title; click here to read more.]

“Death makes his first pick. Another choice is made in the morning, in the night and fog.”

Synopsis:
Unflinching footage from WWII concentration camps is contrasted with peaceful scenes of the same spots years later.

Genres:

Alain Resnais Films
Documentary
French Films
Nazis
World War II

Review:
Thirty-two-year-old Alain Resnais directed this short documentary made ten years after Nazi concentration camps were liberated. It’s likely not included in Peary’s GFTFF simply due to its length (only 32 minutes long), given that it otherwise meets all criteria for a must-see film — not just for movie-lovers but for all of humanity. If you haven’t seen this film yet, stop and go do that now (it’s easily available on YouTube) — and then you will likely want to read more about its construction and reception. In doing so, I learned quite a few things, including the following:

Resnais made this film on the condition that someone who had actually experienced the Holocaust — Jean Cayrol — write the screenplay.
According to Wikipedia (drawing from a 2007 book on the film by Sylvia Lindeperg):

“The film draws on several sources, including black-and-white still images from various archives, excerpts from older black-and-white films from French, Soviet, and Polish newsreels, footage shot by detainees of the Westerbork internment camp in the Netherlands, or by the Allies’ ‘clean-up’ operations, plus new color and black-and-white footage filmed in 1955 at concentration camps. Resnais filmed his color sequences in Eastmancolor rather than Agfacolor, using the footage to contrast the desolate tranquility of several concentration camps — Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Struthof, and Mauthausen — with the horrific events that occurred there during World War II, to muse on the diffusion of guilt, and to pose the question of responsibility.”
One particular still in the film — showing a French gendarme cap on a guard overlooking a camp — was obscured in earlier versions but restored for the DVD version.
According to IMDb’s trivia page:

“The then Federal German government intervened successfully to prevent the film being shown at the Cannes Film Festival on the grounds that the festival’s regulations prevented any film being shown that would cause offense to any participating nation. Ironically, the director of the Berlin Film Festival lobbied hard for the film to be shown at his festival.”