Night and Fog

Four years before "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and 10 years after the end of WWII and the revelation of the monstrous factories of mass extinction, Alain Resnais makes a poetic essay-documentary, delivering the most devastating film on Nazi concentration camps ever made.

Four years before "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and 10 years after the end of WWII and the revelation of the monstrous factories of mass extinction, Alain Resnais makes a poetic essay-documentary, delivering the most devastating film on Nazi concentration camps ever made, in 31 minutes flat. With exemplary restraint, density, depth of emotion, sobriety and an overpowering sense of debt to mankind, he builds a perfect filmmaking specimen for the ages.

Going back and forth in time, alternating between color and black&white, he builds a crescendo of horror with the help of Hanns Eisler’s music score. Yet the film is neither acerbic nor pointlessly rhetorical and aggressive. On the contrary, Resnais guides the narrative with a gentle hand, sweetly and simply framing the green pastures covering the horrific remains, before proceeding to illustrate their demonic use with a rhythmic procession of devastating images. Y.B.