Night and Fog | Nuit et brouillard (1955)

Synopsis

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz.

One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Nuit et Brouillard contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage.

With Nuit et Brouillard, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man’s violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.  -- The Criterion Collection

Powerful and still controversial, Alain Resnais' chilling yet poetic documentary portrait of the Nazi death camps ten years after their liberation shifts between archival and contemporary footage of the infamous sites, their unnerving serenity in the present contrasted with quiet horror to archival images of freight cars arriving with their human cargo, underground "showers," and mountains of shoes now without owners.

Overlaid by a lyrical narration written by the novelist Jean Cayrol (himself a survivor of the Gusen concentration camp) and a score by Bertolt Brecht's musical collaborator Hanns Eisler, Night and Fog is one of the cinema's most profound and important works on memory, forgetting and moral reckoning.  -- IMDb

Read about this film

Country: France
Language: French
Color: Black and White | Color
Runtime: 33 Min.