Night And Fog

Year: 1955

Grade: B+

Country: France

Director: Resnais

Review

i’ve never seen shoah, but if it’s as powerful as this then i don’t want to see it. this film is only 32 minutes long, whereas shoah is like nine hours long. night and fog begins in 1955 (the time of filming) at a concentration camp. the opening images are of the plains that surround the camp and slowly the camera moves to expose the barbed wire. throughout the film contrasts such as this are employed, visually, audibly and verbally. music (which i didn’t care for that much) moves up and down to match the visuals and words. the film attempts to recreate, in 30 minutes, the experience of being torn from your family, shipped to a camp, stripped of your clothes, beaten, worked, starved…you’ve seen the documentaries, been to the holocaust museums, seen the movies, read the books, so i don’t need to go through it all here. most of the film uses archival footage – some of the more powerful images include a warehouse of woman’s hair. nothing but hair just piled up. there are a lot of holocaust-related films out there, but this one provides a good “people’s history of the holocaust” in a bite size format. required viewing for a history class.