Night and Fog

Multiple meanings can be attached to the title of Alain Resnais’ landmark Holocaust documentary, Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard). Taken literally the “night” refers to the darkness that the deportees arrive in, but it can also refer to the certain death that most are condemned to or to the secrecy of the horrors. The “fog” implies ambiguity—a cloak that makes the ultimate fate of some deportees uncertain and allows the world to deny responsibility for what happened during the Holocaust by claiming ignorance.
Night and Fog begins very peacefully—lyrically surveying a pastoral countryside nearly ten years after the end of WWII. But this is no ordinary countryside—we are in Poland following the railroad tracks that lead directly into Auschwitz. Michel Bouquet matter of factly narrates in French as the English subtitles ask questions like “what horrors have these silent tracks witnessed?” Even if you don’t think a subtitled movie is for you, the visuals communicate far more and you’ll soon forget that you’re watching a foreign language film.
Soon enough the greens and browns of the idyllic countryside transition to black and white artistic collages of archive footage that we can thank the Germans for. Some of these scenes have been seen in other documentaries about the Holocaust, but (except for the scenes taken from Triumph of the Will) they are used for the first time in Night and Fog. Continually we have the relentless narrator explaining historical facts that have been gleaned from meticulously kept German records.
Scenes of deportees with stars of David embossed on their coats being herded onto the freight cars come as no surprise, but images of mountains of women’s’ hair, soap manufactured from the prisoners’ fat, disfigured prisoners who were subjects of unbelievable medical experiments, decapitated corpses, and pencil thin skeletal bodies being bulldozed and dumped into mass graves convince us that the Holocaust was a true Hell on Earth—the definitive example of man’s inhumanity to man.
How do Holocaust apologists explain the gas chambers at Auschwitz with cement ceiling that has been partially chipped away by desperate fingernails attempting to claw their way out of their death trap? And what about those ovens and the charred remains of burnt bodies? And the thousands of starving survivors recovered when the Allies free the camps?
Renais follows the brutal imagery with clips from the Nuhrenberg trials where the Nazi officials all claim that they weren’t responsible—that they were merely following orders. The question then remains —who is responsible? Before you jump to an answer, ask yourself why you feel a pang of guilt while watching the film.
As Renais bookends his film with additional pastoral countryside scenery from the Auschwitz area, those questions will remain and will continue to haunt. It’s quite plain to see why François Truffaut once called this the greatest film ever made, especially when we consider its poetic impact.