Night and Fog

During World War II, documentary-style films were utilized as propaganda by the Allies and Axis powers alike. Films like London Can Take It in 1940 served to demonstrate the resiliency of the British people in face of bombings, while Triumph of the Will in 1935 boasted the power of Adolf Hitler.

The rise of documentaries extended beyond the war, films continuing to revolutionize the genre as they shifted away from purely propagandic material. Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, from 1955, is a foundational work among documentaries for its handling of the Holocaust, a subject commonly deemed too horrible to represent before this depiction.

In the ten years after World War II, there was a desire to move past the world’s collective losses. But with this strive for the future came a willingness to ignore the atrocities committed and endured in the previous decades.

People outright denied the existence of the Holocaust or argued that its effects were exaggerated. Nazis claimed they were not responsible for their actions, some reintegrating into society, unpunished.

Night and Fog insists against post-war society’s inclination to simply move on from the horrors of the Holocaust through stylistic traits such as camera tracking and hard cuts and through its narration’s self-reflexivity.

A notable thread throughout Night and Fog is its juxtaposition of peaceful present-day footage and gruesome archival film and photos. It contains colorful landscapes as the camera roves over the remnants of concentration camps. These scenes are abruptly clashed with black-and-white evidence of the horrors that occurred on those now-serene lands. This imagery is guided by a narrator who utilizes the medium to communicate directly with the viewer. All of these features, which serve the film’s purpose of insisting upon the remembrance of the Holocaust and the learning of its lessons, are exemplified in its final scene.

The camera tracks along a murky pond, deserted barracks, and the rubble of a concentration camp’s crematorium. Its deliberateness builds suspense as the unassuming scenes are revealed to be sites of great evil. This reveal was especially dramatic in the opening scene, before the audience was fully introduced to the concepts and themes of the film.

Then, the green meadow bleeding into barbed wire was a moment of surprise. Now, the viewer knows that the water from this pond filled mass graves, that the buildings had a specific, sinister purpose. This could not be any countryside — it, and the viewer, are haunted by the memory of what happened there.

In the camera’s slow movement, the audience is given time to reflect upon the disturbing violence they have witnessed and absorb the narrator’s concluding words. The focus on the landscapes of today, and juxtaposing them with the past, brings attention to the continued relevancy of the Holocaust.

The audience, when forced to look at the remnants of horror, is “(brought) back from the safe distance of past time to our own responsibility” (Flitterman-Lewis, 207).

Similarly, the audience is forced to look at the horror itself. Directly before the sustained shot of the still pond, Resnais shows some of the most gruesome images yet within Night and Fog. Skeletal bodies lay dead in a pit, carelessly strewn over one another. Each rib, each segment of their spines is visible under skin stretched thin.

Then there is a pond.

This hard cut is jarring, and even more brutal when done in reverse. It mirrors the way Holocaust victims had their lives upended, but unlike the millions who died in camps and the others who survived, Night and Fog’s audience can turn away. That is what post-war society had done, and this is how Resnais asks them to stop. The hard cuts to cruel imagery insist that the suffering of the Holocaust is not ignored.

The narration, especially in this final scene, makes the same plea. It directly addresses the audience in a manner normal to reflective documentaries, turning them from “an observer of documented events to a witness with the capacity for moral judgment” (Flitterman-Lewis, 209). They are a bystander with the power to act.

The narration establishes this connection through inclusive language, noting “our own faulty memories” and repeated uses of “we.” It calls out the audience members it wishes to convert, namely those who deny the Holocaust, allow Nazis to go unpunished, and/or think it could never happen again and is thus best left in the past. The narrator contends that the threat of future atrocities still exists, saying “We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us and a deaf ear to the never-ending cries.”

The film argues, here with its words but also with its visuals, that the evil that allowed for the Holocaust lives on in the audience’s willful ignorance. Through tracking shots that force the viewer to ruminate on the Holocaust’s place in the present, hard cuts that force them to confront the brutality that must not be forgotten, and the direct narration that calls them to action, Resnais’s Night and Fog demands that the Holocaust be remembered and its victims honored through present-day awareness.

Works Cited

Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. “Documenting the Ineffable.” Documenting the Documentary, Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 204-222