Compact and riveting, this documentary is a thirty-two minute history lesson on the evils of Hitler and his horrid concentration camps of WWII. The film is uncomfortable to sit through. It may leave you drained. Almost certainly, it will leave you angry.
The place names sound academic: Dachau, Ravensbruck, and of course ... Auschwitz. But the images are real. They are graphic, and they are grizzly. They sear your brain with a ferocity that no learned professor could ever hope to impart from a classroom lectern. Set a Holocaust denier down, in a front row seat to watch this film. Then see what happens to his "belief" that the Holocaust never happened.
The film opens in the mid-1950s with the camera panning empty fields where the camps once existed. These images are in color. Then, flash back to 1933, in B&W, when the horrors began. And then in subsequent years, German industry plans the camps, and the Jewish people become slave labor to construct their own prisons. These flashbacks show real people, real exteriors, real interiors. No profit-motivated blockbuster by Steven Spielberg will ever match "Night And Fog" for its honesty and its sense of grim reality.
The film's narration is fast and intense. Not a moment is wasted; no filler. It's all substance, deep and piercing. It's important to prepare yourself mentally before viewing this film. And I would not recommend it for children.
What's mind-boggling to me is the pervasiveness of the evil. It wasn't just a deluded Hitler and his terrorist thugs. It was the general mentality. Fostered by grinding poverty and a communications vacuum, Hitler's egomaniac madness forced a general acceptance of evil, helped along by Goebbels and his propaganda machine. As the film shows, even doctors and nurses succumbed to the idea that genocide was "rational".
Down the road of far right-wing ideology ... where does it lead? Keep traveling down that road and eventually it leads to Hitler, to dictatorship, to torture, and to the acrid stench of Nazi concentration camps. It would be hard to imagine a more massive evil.
I'm rather inclined to agree with film director Francois Truffaut that "Night And Fog" is one of the greatest films ever made ... if not the greatest.
The place names sound academic: Dachau, Ravensbruck, and of course ... Auschwitz. But the images are real. They are graphic, and they are grizzly. They sear your brain with a ferocity that no learned professor could ever hope to impart from a classroom lectern. Set a Holocaust denier down, in a front row seat to watch this film. Then see what happens to his "belief" that the Holocaust never happened.
The film opens in the mid-1950s with the camera panning empty fields where the camps once existed. These images are in color. Then, flash back to 1933, in B&W, when the horrors began. And then in subsequent years, German industry plans the camps, and the Jewish people become slave labor to construct their own prisons. These flashbacks show real people, real exteriors, real interiors. No profit-motivated blockbuster by Steven Spielberg will ever match "Night And Fog" for its honesty and its sense of grim reality.
The film's narration is fast and intense. Not a moment is wasted; no filler. It's all substance, deep and piercing. It's important to prepare yourself mentally before viewing this film. And I would not recommend it for children.
What's mind-boggling to me is the pervasiveness of the evil. It wasn't just a deluded Hitler and his terrorist thugs. It was the general mentality. Fostered by grinding poverty and a communications vacuum, Hitler's egomaniac madness forced a general acceptance of evil, helped along by Goebbels and his propaganda machine. As the film shows, even doctors and nurses succumbed to the idea that genocide was "rational".
Down the road of far right-wing ideology ... where does it lead? Keep traveling down that road and eventually it leads to Hitler, to dictatorship, to torture, and to the acrid stench of Nazi concentration camps. It would be hard to imagine a more massive evil.
I'm rather inclined to agree with film director Francois Truffaut that "Night And Fog" is one of the greatest films ever made ... if not the greatest.