Night and Fog (1956)
Directed by Alain Resnais
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
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What critics compared Night and Fog to
NO fictional piece can ever match the horrific reality so vividly chronicled in Resnais' Night and Fog .
For a concentrated overview of Nazi horror, Resnais' poetic thirty-minute Night and Fog remains definitive, but for the hardy, Shoah relentlessly uncovers facets that viewers will never forget, posing questions about just what it means to be a human being in this crazy universe.
Claude Lanzmann's 1985 Shoah is so indebted to this film that it never could have been conceived, much less made, without Resnais' example, and Schindler's List is a cartoon alongside it.
In practice, it competes only with Alain Resnais's nightmarish 1955 short Night and Fog to be the most devastating and comprehensive document about the Holocaust yet produced.
If the first option had been realized so perfectly in Alain Resnais’ brief but powerful 1955 film, Night and Fog, and the second option too vulgar for everyone but the Americans, what were filmmakers who wanted to explore the millions of stories of the Holocaust to do? Claude Lanzmann, a French filmmaker and contemporary of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, spent eleven years exploring a third option.
Aside from Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1956) and Alfred Hitchcock’s long-lost documentary Memory of the Camps (1945), I suspect almost none of this footage, grisly and gut-wrenching, has been seen by a large audience.
A traumatic event occurred in high school when we members of the senior class were shown a black and white documentary called Night and Fog, by Alain Resnais.
Documentaries like “Shoah” and Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” suggest that you don’t, while historical epics like “Schindler’s List” insist that you must. If the latter argues that seeing is believing, the former maintains that seeing wouldn’t help — that some things are too unfathomable for the human eye to comprehend from a distance, and can only hope to be understood by their absence.
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Waititi is trying to exploit the tension between our suspicion that nothing here is to be taken seriously—including Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson, among others, as cartoonish Nazi recruiters tossing off anti-Semitic slurs to their underaged protégé—and our knowledge that the movie is working through some of the most sensitive subject matter imaginable, including horrific incidents and ideologies previously explored in landmark works from The Pawnbroker and Schindler’s List to Night and Fog and Shoah.