Night and Fog
1956 · 32m · France
Directed by Alain Resnais
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
A haunting documentary that juxtaposes color footage of the abandoned Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps with black-and-white archival material, meditating on the machinery of the Holocaust and the danger of collective forgetting.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Cayrol's narration over the cut between color present and black-and-white horror still does what other Holocaust films can't. Half an hour, no negotiation. The benchmark.
Resnais and Cayrol's juxtaposition of tranquil color present with archival horror constitutes the foundational cinematic confrontation with the Holocaust, and the moral seriousness has only deepened with time. Required viewing.
Resnais cuts between color present-day Auschwitz tracking shots and black-and-white archival horror — that color/temporal binary is the structural device that lets the film address forgetting directly. Jean Cayrol survived the camps and wrote the narration. 30:43 on Vimeo.
Reviews
The most noble and necessary film ever made.
One of the two or three most powerful and intelligent nonfiction films ever made, and perhaps the most aesthetically sophisticated and ethically irreproachable film about the Holocaust.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 1956
- Jean Vigo Prize 1956, Jean Vigo Prize