Nuit et brouillard (1956) Online

1956 Michel Bouquet Reinhard Heydrich Heinrich Himmler Alain Resnais

Original Title :: Nuit et brouillard
Genre :: Movie / Documentary / Short / History / War
Year :: 1956
Directror :: Alain Resnais
Cast :: Michel Bouquet,Reinhard Heydrich,Heinrich Himmler
Writer :: Jean Cayrol
Type :: Movie
Time :: 32min
Rating :: 8.6/10

Nuit et brouillard (1956) Online

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 footage 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.

Uncredited cast:
	Michel Bouquet	-	Narrator (voice) (uncredited)
	Reinhard Heydrich	-	Himself (archive footage) (uncredited)
	Heinrich Himmler	-	Himself (archive footage) (uncredited)
	Adolf Hitler	-	Himself (archive footage) (uncredited)
	Julius Streicher	-	Himself (archive footage) (uncredited)

While it was thought that Alain Resnais was reluctant to take on a Holocaust documentary, when interviewed in 1992 he said that the film is supposed to serve as an allegory for the French intervention in Algeria which occurred at the time of the film's release. Therefore, it make sense that he would use the word "deporte" instead of "jew" he was trying to make an anti-genocide statement in general and to use the word 'Jew' would have taken away from his larger message. That is also why he chose to use the figure of 9 million killed; including not only the 6 million Jews but also the 3 million others that were killed under the Nazi regime.

In the DVD re-release, there is a subtle but controversial difference in one of the still photographs of a Nazi concentration camp in southern France. In this version the distinctive profile of a French gendarmes can be seen at one of the camps, implying that the French Vichy government of the time was aware of and perhaps involved in the management of the camps. This same photograph appears in the original version but the gendarme's profile was obscured at the insistence of the French government (who commissioned the film) when the film was in post-production.

One of the first documentaries to openly deal with the Holocaust.

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.

The title refers to a strategy instigated by Himmler in December 1941 that helped propagate the fear of the Third Reich. Anyone caught resisting the Nazi occupiers would be arrested and then immediately whisked off to the camps in such a way that they would vanish without a trace, "into the night and fog".

François Truffaut considered this 33 minute documentary to be the greatest film ever made.

The film from Buchenwald, directed by Billy Wilder, with "Human skin lampshade" and two shrunken heads is considered as allied propaganda as the lamp from the movie has vanished and was not submitted as evidence in 1947 trial. Heads were submitted but none of the accused was specifically charged with shrinking these heads.

Jean Cayrol found the project immensely distressing to work on, given the fact that he had been a concentration camp inmate. How he got round it was not to provide text, segment by segment, to Alain Resnais who would normally have edited the images around it. Instead, Cayrol wrote an initial text based on his recollections of Resnais' first cut. Resnais' assistant Chris Marker then reordered the script to match the sequence of shots and returned the restructured script to Cayrol who then rewrote the script.

At the 1954 exhibition at the Institut Pedagogique National, producer Anatole Dauman asked director Alain Resnais to direct a study of the Holocaust. But Resnais wasn't keen as he didn't want to express opinions on an event that he hadn't witnessed. His condition was that novelist Jean Cayrol agree to script the commentary. Cayrol, however, was even more reluctant to go near the project, given that he was a Holocaust survivor and didn't want to revisit some very painful memories. Resnais' collaborator Chris Marker was able to persuade him otherwise.

Alain Resnais was reluctant to take on the Holocaust documentary until Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol joined in the project.

The film's working title was "Resistance and Deportation". This was changed as it couldn't be applied to the German population.

The film was commissioned by the Comite d'Histoire de la Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale - a government commission assigned the tasks of assembling documentary material on and of launching historical inquiries and studies in the period of the French Occupation - and the Reseau de Souvenir, an association devoted to the memory of those who died in the camps.

Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider.

In Spain was only released in 3 theaters: Madrid (Conde Duque, Verdi) and Barcelona (Verdi). The film was projected 1 day in subtitled version.

This film has a 100% rating based on 20 critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

This film is part of the Criterion Collection, spine #197.

User reviews

Gagas

If you want to describe or give your audience a feeling for the holocaust, or "Man's Inhumanity To Man", then this is the vehicle to use..Show it..be warned, it is so powerful, that you will never forget what you see, neither will any of your viewers..It is impossible to describe, intermixing l955 footage of Auchwitz Concentration Camp, with captured Nazi footage which the allies found at the end of the war, and the scenes of American and British troops liberating the camps...In French, with English subtitles.. and scenes that are unforgettable and horrific. Even the sad music of death from this film plays in my ears, and I have not seen it in 15 years. Once you hear it, you will know.

This is the one to show if you want people to understand the truth of what happened and the reason for its reaction in today's current events....It is shocking in a special way. I showed it to my classes. Students were warned, and told what was coming, they said it would be "nothing" By the end some were crying and moaning in horror...

Ƀ⁞₳⁞Ð Ƀ⁞Ǿ⁞Ɏ

I consider myself to have a fairly strong stomach- I've seen the results of traffic accidents and violent crimes, and like anyone else I have seen (via the TV) the horrors of war. But I was just totally unprepared for this. It was thirty harrowing minutes of a sight-seeing tour of hell.

It was so difficult for me to sit through that I was tempted to shut the DVD player off three times, but I told myself, "No, this is important. It has to be seen, if only as a reminder of what can happen when an inhuman world-view is fused to state-of-the-art technology." The Holocaust was far more (and worse) than simple mass-killing, awful as that is. It was a business decision, coolly and scientifically calculated, to destroy millions of innocents while reaping a profit from them- in death as well as in life.

The sight of the starved, broken bodies, the ghastly scenes taken in the medical labs in the death camps, the sight of little children being led by the hand to their last train ride. It is all so monstrous as to be indescribable.

I am glad I watched it. But I do not think that I'll be watching it ever again, and I give it a 10. It affected me that deeply.

Wat!?

I had heard the phrase "Night and Fog", but had missed the true meaning of it until I saw this movie sitting on a shelf in a local video store. I rented it and watched.

I don't possess a vocabulary to convey the impact the images had upon me. I sat unmmoving, sick to my stomach. Those images would not leave my head.

As a student of history, I had seen still images and brief clips of the victims of the Holocaust. None of it compared to seeing these images moving across my screen.

To any doubters of the Holocaust, I say, "Watch this film!" It did happen. This is the result of hatred and complacency. We like to think it couldn't happen here, until we remember the treatment of the Native Americans and the slaves brought to this country. We think it could never happen again, until Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, Rwanda, etc., showed it still does.

Frey

This extraordinary film was, of course prohibited during the years that Argentina was ruled by the military dictatorship. Only one man, dared to show it in the middle of mass genocide. This teacher, Manlio Pereira, was the director of the only private film school during the late ´70s. Obviously the school received strange invasions of military spies, but Pereira not only continued to show this masterpiece, but also made a great ceremony out of it, speaking loudly and profoundly of what nazism meant, what were it terribly effects, and why Argentina has falled again in the taste for this awfull criminal behaviour. It is a shame that not always such outstanding names like these are remembered for this little great things.

Capella

Called the "greatest film of all time" by director Francois Truffaut, the documentary Night and Fog by Alain Resnais shows the holocaust tragedy in all its horror. Though the film is only thirty minutes in length, it is devastating in its impact so approach with caution. Night and Fog refers to the arrival of prisoners in Auschwitz under the cover of darkness and also the ultimate failure of the Nazis at Nuremberg to take responsibility for it. Written by Jean Cayrol, a holocaust survivor, and poetically narrated by Michel Bouquet, its gruesome images seem like a surreal nightmare. The purpose of the 30-minute documentary is to document for future generations what actually took place in the camps since this was a time when officialdom was reluctant to talk about what happened and the full extent of the horror was not generally known.

Another purpose is to show the ultimate failure of the Nazis at Nuremburg to take responsibility for it. It would have been welcome to also depict the complicity of others: big business, the other victims of the Nazi's, similar atrocities such as the My Lai massacre, ethnic cleansing, genocide, state violence and so forth but this was not possible given the length of the film and its purpose. Today, when there is so much holocaust denial, people need to be reminded not that the Nazis were demons but of the consequences of unchecked state power without an ethical base.

The film opens in 1955 with an image of a barren field of grass with lush romantic music in the background. The scene then abruptly shifts to wartime. We are in Auschwitz and the prisoners are arriving. We are shown scenes shot after liberation that are so shocking that they have never been made public outside of this film. Resnais does not spare us: the hair shaved off the heads of women piled high on the floor, bodies -- men -women - children -- are tossed in a garbage pit like so much rubbish, their fat used to make soap. The film only lasts a short time, but the images remain indelible. Unwillingness to acknowledge responsibility is depicted in brief scenes of the Nuremberg Trials. As we witness the conscious distortion of the past still going on today, we are left numb.

Buriwield

I originally had no intention to see this movie and had no idea that it even existed until I saw it. I actually saw it in High School Economics class (of all places)because my teacher had just finished showing it to his world history class and instead of wanting to hear him drone on about the GDP and recessions, we smooth talked him into showing us what was in his VCR. We had no idea what we were about to see.

This movie is probably the best holocaust documentary ever made. The images of piles of human hair, emaciated skeletons being pushed around by bulldozers, lampshades of human skin, men looking like corpses walking around, has never left me. The opera and classical music in the background helps to further add to the shock value of this film.

After about 10 minutes, kids in my class told my teacher we didn't want to watch this movie anymore. We stopped it and there was still 30 minutes left in class. We didn't learn anything about economics that day, we talked about the holocaust instead.

Elizabeth

Resnais intersperses then-current-day (1955) color footage of Auschwitz with archival B&W to demystify and provide context for the Holocaust in modern western society rather than in anything unique to the German experience of totalitarianism. Photos of concentration camp personnel at home with their families invite the viewer to reflect on the banality of evil. Construction of the camps is described as like that of any large project, requiring bids, architects, contracts. Heart-wrenching scenes document a prisoner's view, from the transports being loaded through selections, showers/gas chambers, existence in the barracks, and in the end, mass death.

Included on the DVD is an excerpt from a 1994 radio interview with Resnais, wherein he mentions French censors required the film makers to obscure the hat of a policeman guarding prisoners being deported - the French government refused to permit this recognition of French complicity and assistance with the deportations.

Pedar

Alain Resnais' overwhelming short piece on the horrors of the holocaust pretty much had me shaking by the end of the film. All of the footage- even the color footage viewing into the emptiness of the camps- brings the audience to feel a mass of emotions. More than anything, however, the narration is what hits the nail on the head. While it's only half an hour long, rather brief compared to it's dramatized contemporaries like Schindler's List and The Pianist, or the massive documentaries like Sorrow and the Pity or Shoa, I'd think that it should be required viewing for any mature minded person (not for children, it's too disturbing from my perspective) interested in truly comprehending what was really going on in those god-awful years in Europe. A+

Agalen

This movie is the greatest Holocaust film ever, and few will ever deny this fact. Beautiful and intense, its makes the stomach turn when one sees the footage and pictures obtained in this film. I've never seen footage this brutal in my entire life, not even in a movie. The voice-overs seem odd at place, but it is really the voice of history, speaking of unspeakable horrors which are captured almost perfectly in this film. A dark tribute to those who lost their lives in the concentration camps. This should be used as a teaching tool for tolerance and the atrocities of World War II.

Auridora

Alain Resnais, a distinguished cinema director, working with Jean Cayrol, produced a document for all humanity to see and reflect. The director visited some of the concentration camps in Europe, where he filmed the abandoned sites in which millions lost their lives in one of the most shameful times in the history of mankind. European Jews paid a great price for no reason at all. Hitler and his followers decided to eliminate them because they saw in them a threat and their money and their labor would fuel the war machinery they needed to win the war.

The director uses color photography to show how the camps looked in 1955, then switches to the black and white of the material from an earlier time. Mr. Resnais juxtaposes the same camps during the 1940s at the height of the WWII conflict and how the lonely and forgotten places of what the director found in 1955. Even looking at these places ten years after the end of the war, these silent witnesses of the horrors the victims experienced, acquire a surreal look.

It's impossible to fathom what went on. We look in disbelief as bulldozers dump the inert bodies of the dead into common burial places. It's hard to imagine the ordeal these innocent victims went through, even for a moment. They didn't deserve the indignity of dying the way they did at the hands of people that should have known better. No excuses will ever justify what Hitler, and his fanatics, did to eliminate a race that didn't merit their hatred.

"Night and Fog" has powerful images and it packs such power, it's hard to make sense of what one sees in this important documentary that should be seen by everyone.

Samulkis

This incredible documentary concerns on the Nazi horrors, as we see rampage,murders,massacres against the prisoners.Thus,when the incoming transports ,mostly Jews, SS soldiers made instant decisions,those who were fit to labors were sent into the camp,others including the children ,were dispatched immediately to the gas chambers. The picture is told by a voice in off whose narrator is the prestigious French actor Michael Bouquet. The documentary contains archive footage with the protagonists of the tragedy, as appears Adolf Hitler, Reinhard Heydrich,Heinrich Himmler, Julius Streicher, among others. It packs sensible and relaxed musical score fitting to horrible frames composed by Eisler and conducted by Georges Delerue. The film is perfectly edited and directed by Alain Resnais who takes WWII shots adding recent images of concentration camps and specially from Auschwitz.

The short-documentary is based on real events by means of photographs and stock-footage. As appears work camps are transformed into extermination centers to implement the policy of genocide thought at the Wannsee Conference .All four camps,Sobibor, Chelmo, Blezek and Treblinka in the Lublin district of Poland were under the command of SS Odilo Globocnick and of course Himmler, the architect of final solution.There was some minor industrial activity linked to the war effort but the main work was the execution of inmates.Millions of prisoners died in the concentration camps through mistreatment, disease, starvation, and overwork, or were executed as unfit for labor. More than three million Jews died in them, usually in gas chambers, although many were killed in mass shootings and by other means.

Prisoners were often transported in inhumane conditions by rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination. The prisoners were confined to the rail cars, often for days or weeks, without food or water. Many died of dehydration in the intense heat of summer or froze to death in winter. Concentration camps also existed in Germany itself, and while they were not specifically designed for systematic extermination, many of their prisoners perished because of harsh conditions or were executed.Victims were brought to the camp in unventilated transports, and all but a handful were gassed after arrival,the gas chambers could accommodate hundred prisoners at one time using Zyclon B which was a crystallized prussic acid which dropped into death chamber ,most of their corpses were burned in open pits. The documentary reflects astonishing images of the exterminations camps. These camps differed from the rest, since not all of them were also concentration camps. Although none of the categories is independent, and each camp could be classified as a mixture of several of the above, and all camps had some of the elements of an extermination camp, systematic extermination of new-arrivals occurred in very specific camps. Of these, four were extermination camps, where all new-arrivals were simply killed – the "Aktion Reinhard" camps (Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec), together with Chelmno. Two others (Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek) were combined concentration and extermination camps. Others were at times classified as "minor extermination camps".

Tenius

Alan Resnais' "Night and Fog" was made in 1955 and illustrates with ghastly details exactly what went on inside the Nazi death camps of Struthuf,Oranienburg,Auschwitz,Belsen,Ravenbruck and Dachau.The footage was shot with the Nazi's own cameras and those of the liberating Allied Forces.This thirty minutes documentary is extremely graphic and disturbing.It shows buckets of detached heads lining the corridors,medical 'experiments' in progress and huge mounds of half burnt bodies being bulldozed into mass graves.Resnais filmed color footage of the empty,overgrown concentration camps Auschwitz and Majdanek and juxtaposed it with historical black and white images.The score by Hans Eisler is incredibly powerful as is the narration written by Jean Cayrol,a French poet,novelist and camp survivor.This is surely the film that needs to be seen by everyone interested in the true story of the Holocaust.10 out of 10.

IGOT

This movie is extremely disturbing and it really shows how awful concentration camps were. It was very moving. I must warn you it is extremely graphic and if you are squeamish I don't recommend seeing it due to the disturbing images of inmates and Nazi torture. It is all in french but it is dubbed.

If you like the sad historical truth of the Holocaust, then Night and Fog is a must see movie.

This film is not suitable for young children. Teenagers might be a little better but the pictures are quite gross so they must be prepared.

Alsantrius

I stared at the wall for what seemed an hour. Time meant little to me. After watching Alain Resnais' 1955 Holocaust film, "Night and Fog," I struggled to remove my mind from Auschwitz. Images of death echoed in my head. Bits of poetic narration played over and over. "Who is responsible?"

I came about this film by accident. I am an English teacher, and currently my students are reading Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize winning memoir, "Night." Looking for a visual connection to the piece, I came across "Night and Fog." At 31 minutes, it appeared the perfect video complement to that devastating book. After watching the film in my dark, empty classroom, I realized the film offered so much more.

In a culture where violence and images of death are glamorized, "Night and Fog" serves a unique purpose. It cuts through the desensitized soul and puts us face-to-face with true, unadulterated evil. While many might suggest this is overkill, occasionally we need to do this if only to remind ourselves of man's potential to perpetrate the abominations this film so cruelly unveils. We need to force ourselves to confront such forces, if only to ensure the film's prophetic final lines do not become a reality. "Who is on the lookout...to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?"

This is the question which consumed me as I stared seemingly forever at the wall after the film ended. This is the question I want my students to ask. After much deliberation, I decided to show it, not as a history lesson, but as a moral lesson in the nature of evil. Great films get a strong reaction. Resnais' film is one of the greats.

Qucid

Deeply disturbing black and white images from the liberation of the Nazi death camps are framed by beginning and ending color footage with narration exhorting the viewer to never forget what we learned from the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

So what did we learn? Yes, we learned the levels of depravity to which humans will sink, but more importantly we learned how easily a troubled society can jump on the bandwagon of a demagogue who uses a minority as a scapegoat for the society's troubles, such as Hitler used the Jews. We also learned the power of propaganda.

I have always thought this film should be shown to all high-school students on a double-feature with "Triumph of the Will," Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film glorifying the Nazi party to a Germany in the midst of a terrible depression. In "Triumph of the Will," we see a party comprised of people from all parts of the country and all walks of life uniting to bring the country together. It is easy to imagine German people searching for hope being persuaded by such rhetoric.

In "Night and Fog," we see the evil which can result when society gives virtually unlimited power to such a demagogue. Unfortunately, society seems not to have learned the lesson nearly as well as subsequent demagogues have learned it. For this reason, "Night and Fog" is just as meaningful today as it was when it was made almost 50 years ago.

Doukasa

The title of this film, NIGHT AND FOG, is completely appropriate at expressing the deeply low nature of what true horror is. The subject involving the Holocaust is a really hard subject for me to really deal with. I'm not Jewish, but the thought of such horrible things being done to innocent people by people who have no true reason just really disturbs me. This film has demonstrated a truly black nature of what cruelty is. The men, women, and children in these concentration camps had gone through pain and horror that not many ever experience. The truly dark tone of this entire documentary is very appropriate in storytelling what occurred in these places. While the images shown to us are, in themselves, truly graphic, it's the whole nature of the film that really can get to the viewer. While NIGHT AND FOG is very difficult to watch, it should still be watched, as it achieves pretty much more of what people expect when watching this. The music is remarkably uncomfortable but not exactly dark, which adds to the complete uncomfortable nature of the film. It's light sounding music. Many people will think," Why in hell would someone, who is decent and healthy, want to fill their heads with these kinds of disturbing things?!" I think it should be watched because the film shows a different side of the human nature, not only the bad kind, but the kind of human nature that continues trying to stay strong and not give up, no matter what they are being put though. The human spirit is a truly remarkable thing that can help anyone and everyone find a way. I am not at all religious, but i feel that religion is a powerful idea that can help the most tortured people find the light. This film also shows that times change. We live in a day and age where everybody and everything has become improved and more people are willing to help the less fortunate. We no longer live in a world containing such ugly as this film. We don't live in a post-apocalyptic looking world like the one depicted in this film. We no longer live in a world full of night and fog, but if we aren't careful we will go right back to that world.

Umsida

This short film is one of the best ones I have seen about the holocaust. It's blunt and unflinching in how it approaches the horrors of the mass extermination of the masses--particularly the Jews of Europe. Although VERY disturbing in its imagery, it is important because death and mass murder SHOULD be disturbing. Technically, this was well-made--with an excellent use of film footage and modern color footage combined with very good (and not preachy) narration. Because it is so blunt and disturbing, it's best that little kids not see this and older kids/teens who see this should have the chance to process and discuss the film.

FYI--try to find the Criterion version of the film, as it includes an interesting interview with Resnais (the director). He indicated that the French government censors made him change a portion of the film to block out the helmet worn by one of the policemen who is forcing deportees onto the trains. Apparently, he was a FRENCH policemen and this didn't "look good", so the scene was altered. Although a fine film, distortions like this are very scary--as this is revisionism and contrary to honest film-making.

Xurad

Night and Fog documents the tragedy from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor, it pulls you straight into the mood with its poetic narrative, its curiosity arousing opening shot of an abandoned concentration camp and its depressing score.

The infamous Holocaust was known to almost everyone through obscured history teachings and heroic war films that didn't leave me with the impact "Night and Fog" did. We are constantly reminded in films and books that 6 million Jews were massacred and other atrocities the Nazis committed but what impact did it really had? To me, little to non, maybe with just a passing thought "Hitler is a real psycho".

After watching Night and Fog, then i did finally realized the cruelty that had happened, blockbuster films doesn't show you that, history books couldn't paint the picture. The raw stock images and footages used were gruesome, Stretched to my 16:9 monitor, I was stared by a real corpse, witness bodies being bulldozed.... They didn't made me scared but empty, it was weird, indescribable.

We people living in this age are enjoying and entertained by WW2 exploits, Nazis and Hitler being destroyed over and over again in countless films, and us enjoying it, yes "justice" must be served and of cause we are also entertained to have them back as always to be our central villainous figure. This is awfully similar to how the Nazis influence their citizens into believing the Nazi's cause, I'm not saying that modern films of WW2 exploits are all propagandas because most of them are to milk money, yet they delivers the same kind of messages: " Our cause is honorable ", " We serve justice " " We are good and they evil "..... People may argue that the fact is they really are on the good side and films are portraying the fact but that's not the point, the point is what humans are capable of when exposed to all these ideologies, quote from the last stanza of Night and Fog "Are their faces really different from our own?". I couldn't cry nor am i enraged when this documentary completes its final stanza, just empty.

Nern

The problem with most Holocaust films is that they portray the story as a one time only event. They make it so overly sentimental that the viewer is able to distance himself of what he's seeing and takes comfort on the idea that something like that will never happen again.

But not Night and Fog.

Alain Resnais presents the line between past and present as it really is: thinner than we think. To do that, it relies only on real footage of the concentration camps during the Holocaust and of the same concentration camps 10 years after the end of the WW II. The voice over tells us what we are seeing, making us look at all the details, never letting us off the hook. We're not supposed to feel comfortable, not even by looking at abandoned concentration camps. The fingernail scratches on the walls of the gas chambers are there. It happened and we better remember it! The fact that it has only 30 minutes doesn't make it less powerful. On the contrary, it condenses its message into an overwhelming half an hour.

My only complain is for the soundtrack. Its complexity may get a bit distracting and almost inappropriate. Maybe some absolute silence moments could help make the message even stronger, if that's even possible.

Overall, Night and Fog is a masterpiece. The fact that my mind and my body can't disconnect of what I just seen is the first sign I just witnessed something extraordinary.

Zovaithug

Compact and riveting, this documentary is a thirty-two minute history lesson on the evils of Hitler and his horrid concentration camps of WWII. The film is uncomfortable to sit through. It may leave you drained. Almost certainly, it will leave you angry.

The place names sound academic: Dachau, Ravensbruck, and of course ... Auschwitz. But the images are real. They are graphic, and they are grizzly. They sear your brain with a ferocity that no learned professor could ever hope to impart from a classroom lectern. Set a Holocaust denier down, in a front row seat to watch this film. Then see what happens to his "belief" that the Holocaust never happened.

The film opens in the mid-1950s with the camera panning empty fields where the camps once existed. These images are in color. Then, flash back to 1933, in B&W, when the horrors began. And then in subsequent years, German industry plans the camps, and the Jewish people become slave labor to construct their own prisons. These flashbacks show real people, real exteriors, real interiors. No profit-motivated blockbuster by Steven Spielberg will ever match "Night And Fog" for its honesty and its sense of grim reality.

The film's narration is fast and intense. Not a moment is wasted; no filler. It's all substance, deep and piercing. It's important to prepare yourself mentally before viewing this film. And I would not recommend it for children.

What's mind-boggling to me is the pervasiveness of the evil. It wasn't just a deluded Hitler and his terrorist thugs. It was the general mentality. Fostered by grinding poverty and a communications vacuum, Hitler's egomaniac madness forced a general acceptance of evil, helped along by Goebbels and his propaganda machine. As the film shows, even doctors and nurses succumbed to the idea that genocide was "rational".

Down the road of far right-wing ideology ... where does it lead? Keep traveling down that road and eventually it leads to Hitler, to dictatorship, to torture, and to the acrid stench of Nazi concentration camps. It would be hard to imagine a more massive evil.

I'm rather inclined to agree with film director Francois Truffaut that "Night And Fog" is one of the greatest films ever made ... if not the greatest.

Kahavor

Alain Resnais the great French movie director of themes related to the memory, made this appalling documentary in 1955 only 10 years after the end of WWII. At the time it was first forbidden to be shown to avoid offending (!!??) German feelings. It was only allowed after a strong campaign led by French progressive forces. It still remains the best documentary made till today about Nazi concentration and death camps. It shows a counterpoint of images taken when the movie was made with images taken at the time the camps were in use. That counterpoint shows for instance how an apparently beautiful landscape can hide or contain an awful reality or the remembrance of it. This movie is not a mere display of images for how awful they can be. It also conveys the message that (at the time) people should not be fooled to think that those were things of the past that had to do only with a certain time and a certain country. The torturers, the butchers, the murderers and the hangmen were still among us. The following times showed how very right it was. To prove this it suffices to mention, besides Soviet Gulags (some contemporaneous of the Nazi camps), Sabra and Chatyla, Rwanda, Cambodja and last but not least Srebenica. So this movie keeps all its actuality and it's still very much worth to be seen at least to avoid these things to fall into oblivion.

Boraston

The recognized director Truffaut once said that "Night and Fog" by Resnais, was the best movie ever made. I agree. This film is great in every sense of the word. This documentary about the "Nacht und Nebel"-camps from WW2, raises the question: Who is responsible? And who is? How could mankind allow these horryfying camps to ever exist? And they did exist, though the germans did deny it. And is the persecution of certain groups of people still an ongoing experience? These are some of the issues this movie forces the viewer to acknowledge. Clips from then (ww2) and now (1955), haunting music and voice over, makes this work of art unforgetable. Probably what it wanted to be.....

Malann

One of the reasons I strongly believe that horror as a genre reliant of monsters, gore, and mayhem, is dead (or if not, in the ICU) is because no matter how horrible the story, how dark and disturbing the elements that shape it, they cannot and will not hold even a remote candle to the images shown in Alain Resnais' ground-breaking documentary NIGHT AND FOG. Thirty minutes is all it takes to show where exactly those train tracks, now overgrown with weeds, led to. Thirty minutes is what he as a director needs to bring forth imagery so frightening, so nerve-racking, so stomach-wrenching, that once the credits roll, all I could do is sit there (as I did), sweat profusely, suddenly feel like I was watched by these mutilated people who went through the unimaginable, and feel the insane need to take a cleansing shower.

NIGHT AND FOG is cinematic excess, but necessary in order to make its message clear. It's a terrible poem that offers no answers and alternates between its sunny, autumnal color images that celebrated ten years of the end of the Holocaust, to the stark, near abstract horror courtesy from the Nazi's own archived footage that has some of the most brutal testimonies of what man can do to another man due to his race and religion. Proceeding at a near-silent pace, with only a soft string arrangement overheard in the background, NIGHT AND FOG discloses all of its secrets, one by one, pummeling the viewer with unrelenting force. Showcasing a myriad of end results from the endless torture the Jews received from the hand of Nazi Germany, it becomes a Boschian nightmare. One of the most intolerable sequences shows tractors scooping up mutilated bodies and burying them in pits, followed by a hill of human hair (the Nazi's saved everything, we are told; for future use) later used for fabric, skin used as paper (some already showing drawings of elegant ladies), bones used (unsuccessfully) as fertilizer, and bodies in labs, severed from their heads (all piled up like perverse olives in a plate), bodies later used as soap. Surrealism taken into its darkest and most nihilistic moment. NIGHT AND FOG is a terrible glimpse into an abyss that threatens to open its frightful eyes and stare right back at you.

Mezilabar

"Night and Fog" is a chilling, haunting documentary that juxtaposes footage of present-day Auschwitz (present-day at the time of filming) with footage of the atrocities committed there during WWII. I defy anyone to watch this movie and not be affected by what they see. Resnais creates a spare and unsentimental film. There's no editorializing here, no attempts to soften the horror or find redemption in a pitch black period of world history. This makes movies like "Schindler's List" and other Hollywood recreations of the Holocaust look like phony shams, despite whatever good intentions they have. The deserted concentration camps have the feeling of ghost towns; you half expect to see tumbleweeds blowing across the empty spaces. The pain and suffering of the countless victims who went through the camps is almost palpable.

Deeply disturbing, but obviously an important chronicle of an event the world would do wise never to forget.

Grade: A+

Mikarr

This documentary is a statement against the holocaust and the people who still engage in practices that are similar to what happened in the Second World War.

Resnais lifted a big heavy curtain back in 1955 by shooting this doc. A lot of people were still denial of what happened about 15 years before. Resnais was fed up with it and just shot this doc mixing present (1954) footage and original footage from the actual concentration camps in Germany, Poland, Holland etc etc. The footage is shocking to say the least, uncompromising. It shows everything, everything and everything. Truly harrowing. The shot that had the biggest impact on me was the enormous pile of women's hair, this really showed the horrific practices.

People shouldn't think that after seeing this movie they are free of guilt or whatever because these things still happen today, believe it or not.

The only trouble I found with watching this nowadays is the fact that we have already seen most of the footage, this is not something totally new and eye-opening. But I think this could still be a good learning tool to show people the horrors of war and the concentration camps.

10/10

Categories

Related Videos

Nuit et brouillard (1956) Online

User reviews