Certain films are short for a good reason, and the audience, even while acknowledging their importance and quality, may be grateful that they are brief. The deeply unpleasant nature of their subject matter can sometimes be even more traumatic for those who create them than for those who watch them. One such example is Night and Fog, a French documentary directed by Alain Resnais, which, despite having only 33 minutes of running time, has been hailed as one of the most influential films dealing with the Holocaust.
Made a decade after the end of the Second World War, Night and Fog carries an authenticity that many later documentaries about the Holocaust lack. The film employs basic but effective narrative techniques to juxtapose contemporary colour footage of Auschwitz and Majdanek, two notorious Nazi concentration camps, with black-and-white stock footage and still images. Combined with narration by Jean Cayrol, a French author who had survived Mauthausen concentration camp, and accompanied by the haunting score of Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, the film provides a clear idea of what occurred in these camps.
The narrative begins in 1933 with the Nazis coming to power in Germany and building concentration camps that would evolve into well-oiled machines by the start of the war. The film details the train arrivals, the selection processes between those who would perish in gas chambers and those who would be temporarily left alive as slave labourers, as well as the lives and struggles of prisoners within the camps. It also addresses their subjection to abuse, deliberate starvation, torture, horrific medical experiments, and even exploitation after death, with their body parts collected for industrial purposes. The film concludes in 1945 when the Allies liberate the camps, followed by footage of war crime trials where defendants claim that they were not responsible.
Night and Fog is an extremely difficult film to watch due to its graphic nature and the large number of emaciated corpses depicted on screen. It is easy to imagine how challenging it must have been for those who experienced these horrors first hand, like Jean Cayrol.
Originally, Night and Fog was intended as part of events marking the tenth anniversary of the Liberation of France, focusing on the fate of French Resistance members and others sent to concentration camps under Hitler's secret order known as "Night and Fog." However, during its creation, Resnais became more focused on the concentration camps themselves and the Nazi death machinery in general. As a result, the film gained a universal character that dealt with all Nazi victims.
Despite addressing the Holocaust, Night and Fog never mentions Jews by name, which has led to controversies in Israel. The film also stirred up immediate controversy in France due to an image suggesting French Vichy government involvement in deportations, touching on the taboo subject of collaboration during the Nazi occupation. Resnais was forced to alter the image under threat of having a third of his film censored.
In later years, Night and Fog faced criticism for some parts of its narration that did not hold up to historical scrutiny. Nowadays, widely rejected claims about Germans using the bodies of camp victims to make soap or suggestions of nine million victims have been generally considered incorrect. Ironically, these flaws have led some Holocaust deniers to use Resnais' work as an argument in their claims. These shortcomings are largely attributed to the still-insufficient historical research in the first decade after the war.
Yet, despite these flaws, Night and Fog remains a very powerful film. Its importance was almost instantly recognised, with Resnais being given the prestigious Jean Vigo Award and paving the way for his subsequent career as an author of classics associated with the French New Wave. The film has also deeply influenced many other Holocaust films, including Shoah, which took an opposite conceptual approach to make a similar impact.
What makes Night and Fog even more important is its universal character. Unlike many Holocaust films, it does not attempt to provide easy answers and instead ends with a disturbing question: Who was really responsible? Was the Holocaust a unique event in history or something that could happen again? When Resnais made the film, he was deeply concerned about events in Algeria, where French colonial authorities began dealing with a pro-independence insurgency in ways that started to look increasingly sinister and familiar. Considering what is happening in the world today, this question remains more relevant than ever.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
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