Plot Details: This opinion reveals no details about the movie's plot.

Night and Fog ("Nuit et brouillard" in its original French release) is a moving account of the Nazi concentration camps. Though just thirty-one minutes in length and non-fictional, it was described by François Truffaut as the greatest film ever made. Not merely the greatest "documentary," or the greatest "short" – simply "the greatest film ever made." I don't know that I'd want to defend it as "the greatest film ever made," but I also wouldn't want to have to make a case that any other film ever made is more important. Night and Fog is more a contemplative film essay than a documentary. It is less concerned with facts or statistics than in analysis. Other Holocaust films have either overwhelmed viewers with the enormity of this greatest of all examples of man's inhumanity to man or have sought to personalize the story by focusing on one or a few individuals tragically devastated by the event. Night and Fog does neither. It openly acknowledges the futility of trying to comprehend the magnitude of the horror. It doesn't play on our sentiments. Instead, it asks us challenging questions about memory vs. denial, about responsibility vs. denial, and, finally, how denial relates to the risk of present and future recurrences.

Historical Background: Back in 1955, when Night and Fog was made, Alain Resnais was not so well known or highly regarded as he is today. He had yet to make his first feature-length fictional film and the French New Wave did not yet exist. Born in 1922, in Vannes, France, Resnais served during the tail end of World War II. He was not drafted until 1945 and was demobilized about a year later. He began making short and medium-length documentaries, some of which were shown on French television. His first truly noteworthy work was a documentary about Van Gogh (1948), which won an Academy Award. He had early run-ins with the French censors with such works as the documentary Les Statues meurent aussi (1953), which detailed the looting of traditional art works during colonial occupation and the resultant ethnographic collections in museums of France. The film was banned for its anti-colonial stance and earned Resnais the enmity of French military authorities.

The idea for Night and Fog grew out of an exhibition hosted by the Institut Pédagogique National in November of 1954, organized by the Comité d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale. The head of the Comité and film producer Anatole Dauman together agreed that a film should be made to preserve the record of the Holocaust for future generations. Dauman asked Resnais to direct the film. After viewing the source material and discussing the project, Resnais initially refused. He was convinced that his lack of first-hand experience with the death camps would call into question the authenticity of whatever he might create. When Dauman persisted, Resnais struck a bargain. He would relent, if and only if Jean Cayrol could be enticed into writing the script for the film.

Cayrol, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthusen, had credibility to spare. His 1946 collection of poems entitled Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard had provided a powerful evocation of the horrors of the Holocaust. Cayrol, however, was also reluctant to get involved with the project. The prospect was too painful. He was finally persuaded to take a look at the material in Resnais' first cut. Even then, it took the intervention of a mutual friend of Cayrol and Resnais, Chris Marker (who had previously collaborated with Resnais on Les Statues meurent aussi), to gain Cayrol's commitment. Cayrol found the images so distressing, given his own personal history, that he could not work in the normal manner of providing text, segment by segment, as Resnais edited the images. Instead, he wrote an initial text based on his recollections of the screening of Resnais' first cut. Marker reordered the script to match the sequence of shots and returned the restructured script to Cayrol. Cayrol then rewrote the script into the final version to give it poetic continuity. The result was a Holocaust lamentation with a lucidity and poignancy that was unparalleled and which remains, thus far, unmatched.

Production Values: Cayrol took a brilliantly somber and unimpassioned approach. He posed questions rather than stirring emotions through the text. The images of the film are so disturbing they required no trumpeting. The seductively calm and matter-of-fact tone of the script, read clearly but dispassionately by the actor Michel Bouquet, permits viewers to drink in the full magnitude of the terrible circumstances. A pastoral soundtrack, featuring lithe flutes among other instruments, adds to the incongruity between style and substance. Resnais and Cayrol saw their task as creating a collective memory of the Holocaust and recognized that too much shock leads only to denial and amnesia.

In the course of just thirty-one minutes, Resnais reflects on the entire cycle of the history of the death camps – their construction, the systematic genocide and inhumanity, the liberation of survivors, and the decaying and abandoned camps ten years later. We learn about the bidding process by which major German companies competed for the contracts, drafted designs, and profited off the building of the internment camps. We learn about the "ingenuity" that went into improving the efficiency of the extermination process, through the building of the gas chambers, their disguise as hygiene facilities, and the addition of crematoriums. We see the image of a man of indeterminate age as he wastes away, dying with open eyes. We see frames depicting the efforts to make practical uses out of the bodies: the use of skin as parchment for obscene drawings, fat tissue turned into soap, women's hair stored in immense piles, and bones turned to fertilizer. We see the evidence of medical experimentation involving phosphorus burns, castration, and experimental operations. Warehouses are built to hold the shoes, glasses, and other belongings of murdered prisoners. There's a gruesome shot of a basket full of severed heads and another of bulldozers pushing partly decomposed bodies of every size and shape into a mass burial pit. There are the emaciated survivors starring in confusion as their liberators arrive, uncertain as to what it might mean. All of these bits of footage, acquired from British, French, and German sources, are juxtaposed against new footage shot in 1955 of the empty camps, quiet empty places, where "a strange grass now covers the land where the inmates once trod." Resnais films the camps in 1955 in soft pale colors and in long, graceful tracking shots, which contrast sharply with the black-and-white war era images. Viewers can't help but be overwhelmed by the contrast between what once was and the quite, peaceful settings ten years later, as though nothing had ever happened there. Weeds and grass have risen, electric current no longer runs through the fences, and the crematorium smoke stacks gradually turn to rubble, all too much like the decay of memories, as events recede into history.

Themes: Resnais understood his duty well. It is not enough, in a film about the Holocaust, to reflect the horrors of the event. The duty of Holocaust films is to evoke remembrance, lest we be forever doomed to repeat the cycle. "We pretend to take up hope again," says Cayrol, "as the image recedes into the past, as if we were cured once and for all of the scourge of the camps. We pretend it all happened only once at a given time and place." And as we allow ourselves that comfort, genocidal conflicts occur in such places as Yugoslavia, Gwanda, Iraq, and Sudan. "War nods off to sleep," says Cayrol, "but keeps one eye always open." Remembering the Holocaust is remembering mankind's darkest impulses. It is not only about honoring the dead (though that is a worthy enough ambition), it is about the future and due vigilance. "Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?"

Near the end of the film, Resnais inserts clips from the Nuhrenberg trials between the gruesome images of the death camps. We see the camp guards, who operated brothels with better-fed young women, denying responsibility – they only followed orders, they say. Later, we watch the camp commanders denying responsibility – they didn't know what was happening; they, too, were only following orders. "Who, then," wonders Cayrol, "is responsible." All the excuses are thoroughly eviscerated and we realize that it is, in fact, all of us who are responsible. It's you, it's me, it's all of humanity.

One great irony in relation to this film is the frightful contrast between its message and how the film was received. The film is a plea to each and every one of us to take responsibility. The French censors took a look at the film, prior to its release, and were incensed because one scene in which French Jews and Resistance Fighters are being herded onto trains at the Pithiviers Internment camp shows a French gendarme standing guard. It is clear that he is French because he's wearing a képi, which was a kind of cap worn only by the French. The censors demanded that Resnais remove the sequence and threatened to cut the entire last ten minutes of the film unless he did. Resnais compromised to the extent of painting in a beam to mask the guard's cap. He then informed the censors that there would be no change in the final segment, which included the gruesome mounds of corpses, unless they requested the change in writing. The censors didn't want their request made public and backed down. To the French censors, a film about the Holocaust detailing German guilt was fine, but not if it included any hint of French complicity.

In early 1956, Night and Fog won the Prix Jean Vigo on the first ballot – a high honor indeed. France entered the film in the Cannes competition – or tried to – but the German government of the Federal German Republic (FGR) demanded that the film be withdrawn under an article of the Cannes Festival regulations that provided for objection to films deemed offensive to the sensibilities of any participating nation. The previous year, the FGR had similarly suppressed a Yugoslavian film about deportation of Yugoslavian partisans. In the same year that Night and Fog was withdrawn, the British had to withdrawn a film due to an objection by the Japanese. So, once again, denial of responsibility was the order of the day. On the other hand, the Director of the Berlin Film Festival, a Dr. Bauer, expressly requested that War and Fog be entered at the Berlin Film Festival and asked the Bonn government to prepare a German-language version for the benefit of German citizens. Now and then, there are glimmers of hope for mankind.

Bottom-Line: The film's name comes from Cayrol's poetry volume, which in turn drew its name from an order by Hitler, called Nacht und Nebel, which instructed Nazi officials to be ruthless in ensuring that dissidents and opposition agents were made to quietly disappear into the night and fog. Many times, trains loaded with deportees arrived at the concentration camps at night and in the fog and, symbolically, the passengers disappeared into the night of death and the fog of obscurity from human recollection. So, it's an apt title with multileveled meanings.

For the Criterion DVD, the film was restored to the extent possible and represents a major improvement on the older DVD version on Short Cinema Journal. The source material is less than ideal, especially for one sequence involving deportation of victims in boxcars. Nevertheless, most of the black-and-white footage is clear and crisp and all of the color footage is excellent. There's a limited assortment of extras. One is a short 5-minute interview from 1994 with Resnais that reveals some of the history of the making of the film. There are crew profiles for Resnais, producer Anatole Dauman, scriptwriter Jean Cayrol, and cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet. Each of these people went on to distinguished careers of one kind or another. Inside the DVD case is an eight page booklet with three essays, called "Night and Fog," "Origins and Controversies," and "About the Composer." The last pertains to Hanns Eisler, whose score for the film is so highly regarded that it is sometimes performed as an orchestral piece in concert halls. The Criterion DVD provides an "isolated tract" of the score for those who might want to listen to it independent of the images.

Resnais was known as a master of film style and structure. Here he exploits those strengths to turn powerful images of utmost importance into a lesson of the kind that none of us wants to experience but all of us must – if we hope to survive as a species very much further into the future. We owe it not so much to the victims as to ourselves to keep asking the questions that this film so ably poses.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age