NIGHT AND FOG (NUIT ET BROUILLARD) (1955) B/W & C 31m dir: Alain Resnais

Narrated by Michel Bouquet

Brilliant, devastating documentary about the horrors of Auschwitz concentration camp, shot in color and intercut with shocking black and white archival footage of the hideously barbaric results of the brutality and madness of the Nazis. The hauntingly gentle music score by Hanna Eisler is a perfect counterpoint to the harsh realities which occurred.

From Erik Barnouw's Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film: "Of all documentaries born of war horror, the most admired was unquestionably Night and Fog .... It was a searing indictment --- but with a shift in aim. Resnais made brilliant use of a simple device: frequent shifts between black-and-white archive footage of the extermination camps, and sequences in warm color filmed in the verdant surroundings of a former camp. These alternations, bringing us again and again from postcard colors of a postwar tourist world to the black-and-white staring eyes, the barely stirring skeletons, the line-ups of the naked, and the ovens, give the film a greater impact than any other such film had achieved. The impact is intensified by a quietly relfective, powerful commentary written by Jean Cayrol. At the end of the film, in a color sequence, the camera moves along the crematorium ruins, twisted wires, broken watchtowers, and block of cracked concrete.

"Narrator: The crematorium is no longer in use. The devices of the Nazis are out of date. Nine million dead haunt this landscape. Who is on the lookout from this strange tower to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own? Somewhere among us, there are lucky Kapos, reinstated officers, and unknown informers. There are those who refused to believe this, or believed it only from time to time. And there are those of us who sincerely look upon the ruins today, as if the old concentration camp monster were dead and buried beneath them. Those who pretend to take hope again as the image fades, as though there were a cure for the plague of these camps. Those of us who pretend to believe that all this happened only once, at a certain time and in a certain place, and those who refuse to see, who do not heed the cry to the end of time. ..."