Before reviewing a film, the least I can do is to watch it, but how can I properly review something my eyes barely watched? How can I truly express emotions when my eyes kept staring away from the screen? Still, there's no doubt that Alain Resnais' "Night and Fog" remains one of the most essential documentaries ever made, and one to haunt any viewer, regardless of such considerations as age, gender or generation.
The documentary is of thirty-something minutes, but its impact on the mind lasts probably longer than any war epic. Its effect probably relies on the fact that one image is worth a thousand words, therefore, all the still shots of piled up bodies, of remains from the gas chambers, of the devastation inhabiting the last survivors' souls, speak infinite statements about the barbarity mankind reached during these doomed years. Each sight of a cadaver, mouth agape and frozen eyes, is less moved by a voyeuristic attempt to shock the viewers than to shaken the last impulses of disbelief, if they ever existed.
The film is graphic, horrific, the footage of the Death camps is absolutely inconceivable for a rational mind, even more because it's real, but to reduce "Night and Fog" to a succession of unsettling images deprives it from its real meaning, and overlook its achievement on the field of documentary-film-making. It sounds revolting to talk about technical achievement when a film tackles such a subject as Death camps, but in no way, it would have stood the test of time and been regarded as such a masterpiece if it only consisted on pure description. In terms of editing, combination of images and colors, on writing, and I dare to use the word 'storytelling', the film transcends its horrific theme to a level of universal humanism.
"Night and Fog" even resonates as a misleading title, while we expect a movie in black-and-white, made of disturbing archives, we're taken off-guard by the panoramic shots of the abandoned grounds that were, ten years before, the theater of horrific mass-murders. The film was released ten years indeed after the liberation of the Camps by the Nazis, the passing of time had already buried under the green grasses and the blue sky, the unspeakable memories. The contrast between the color and the black-and-white works as a deliberate warning: these abandoned grounds, where cars, peasants, people and animals pass by, are forever haunted by the ghosts from the past that the black-and-white images resurrect in our spirits.
Narrated by Michel Bouquet, the commentary is very straight-forward and never overuses sentimentality, it depict some slices of life (for a lack of a better word) in the Camps. It never occults the omnipresence of death, nor the process of selection that was starting up in the wagons where people stood for hours and hours until the first victims would die of suffocation and starvation, in conditions that are not even tolerable for animals. The selection went on when in the arrival: the film shows some atrocious pictures of prisoners, not the thin and deadly looking we trained our eyes to endure, but those with normal bodies, women with bellies and curvy forms, immediately shot in common graves, before technology would find a faster and more sophisticated way to process.
And those who were spared were only under a suspended sentence, put in a state of slavery, their only right was to work, to eat the soup whose each spoon was a month more or less of life expectancy, before dysentery, medical experimentation, cold, heat, or exhaustion would finish the Nazis' job. And as time went by, a new order began, and the Camp would become a society in microcosm, with its hierarchy, its design, with such ironic oddities as hospitals and jails, and prostitution. The educational value of the film never deprives it from its unbearable horror: what the commentator says, the images show, what he doesn't, the images still show. And while looking at them, we can feel a ghostly past whispering above our shoulders, not to forget these people, that these things happened and, who knows, might happen again.
The scoring is another highlight of the movie. Instead of using a sort of ominous theme, meant to embody the atrocity of the images, it's a sober and austere tune made of a few flute and string sounds. It's like a Bergman movie theme, à la "Autumn Sonata", conveying a constant melancholy, which in the case of "Night and Fog", emphasizes the horror by tunneling it into its inner banality. The routinely aspect of the horror is perhaps more horrifying than the horror itself, people lived there, not for days, not months, but years. And when Death was present every second, when any awkward look could be fatal, multiplying it in years is simply unthinkable.
"Night and Fog" was released at a time when memories were still fresh, but quoting the French singer Jean Ferrat in his song of the same name, that I felt the urge to listen to after the film, and that I highly recommend for the non-French speakers: "How quickly blood dries once it is deemed historical." In 1955, it wasn't history yet, it could still feel as a newsreel. But as it was already making up for posterity, the purpose was already to remind people that routine for Camp prisoners was made of slavery, random executions, rifle scopes, barking German shepherds and soldiers on a perpetual night and fog.
And if fog can clear, if the darkest clouds can leave the sky to let the sunshine return, if a Camp can be liberated, nothing could ever liberate the survivors from the vivid trauma forever engraved in their memories, from their 'night and fog' as states of mind. As for us, all we can do is to share a part of this trauma, as a tragic but necessary heritage of our Human civilization.
The documentary is of thirty-something minutes, but its impact on the mind lasts probably longer than any war epic. Its effect probably relies on the fact that one image is worth a thousand words, therefore, all the still shots of piled up bodies, of remains from the gas chambers, of the devastation inhabiting the last survivors' souls, speak infinite statements about the barbarity mankind reached during these doomed years. Each sight of a cadaver, mouth agape and frozen eyes, is less moved by a voyeuristic attempt to shock the viewers than to shaken the last impulses of disbelief, if they ever existed.
The film is graphic, horrific, the footage of the Death camps is absolutely inconceivable for a rational mind, even more because it's real, but to reduce "Night and Fog" to a succession of unsettling images deprives it from its real meaning, and overlook its achievement on the field of documentary-film-making. It sounds revolting to talk about technical achievement when a film tackles such a subject as Death camps, but in no way, it would have stood the test of time and been regarded as such a masterpiece if it only consisted on pure description. In terms of editing, combination of images and colors, on writing, and I dare to use the word 'storytelling', the film transcends its horrific theme to a level of universal humanism.
"Night and Fog" even resonates as a misleading title, while we expect a movie in black-and-white, made of disturbing archives, we're taken off-guard by the panoramic shots of the abandoned grounds that were, ten years before, the theater of horrific mass-murders. The film was released ten years indeed after the liberation of the Camps by the Nazis, the passing of time had already buried under the green grasses and the blue sky, the unspeakable memories. The contrast between the color and the black-and-white works as a deliberate warning: these abandoned grounds, where cars, peasants, people and animals pass by, are forever haunted by the ghosts from the past that the black-and-white images resurrect in our spirits.
Narrated by Michel Bouquet, the commentary is very straight-forward and never overuses sentimentality, it depict some slices of life (for a lack of a better word) in the Camps. It never occults the omnipresence of death, nor the process of selection that was starting up in the wagons where people stood for hours and hours until the first victims would die of suffocation and starvation, in conditions that are not even tolerable for animals. The selection went on when in the arrival: the film shows some atrocious pictures of prisoners, not the thin and deadly looking we trained our eyes to endure, but those with normal bodies, women with bellies and curvy forms, immediately shot in common graves, before technology would find a faster and more sophisticated way to process.
And those who were spared were only under a suspended sentence, put in a state of slavery, their only right was to work, to eat the soup whose each spoon was a month more or less of life expectancy, before dysentery, medical experimentation, cold, heat, or exhaustion would finish the Nazis' job. And as time went by, a new order began, and the Camp would become a society in microcosm, with its hierarchy, its design, with such ironic oddities as hospitals and jails, and prostitution. The educational value of the film never deprives it from its unbearable horror: what the commentator says, the images show, what he doesn't, the images still show. And while looking at them, we can feel a ghostly past whispering above our shoulders, not to forget these people, that these things happened and, who knows, might happen again.
The scoring is another highlight of the movie. Instead of using a sort of ominous theme, meant to embody the atrocity of the images, it's a sober and austere tune made of a few flute and string sounds. It's like a Bergman movie theme, à la "Autumn Sonata", conveying a constant melancholy, which in the case of "Night and Fog", emphasizes the horror by tunneling it into its inner banality. The routinely aspect of the horror is perhaps more horrifying than the horror itself, people lived there, not for days, not months, but years. And when Death was present every second, when any awkward look could be fatal, multiplying it in years is simply unthinkable.
"Night and Fog" was released at a time when memories were still fresh, but quoting the French singer Jean Ferrat in his song of the same name, that I felt the urge to listen to after the film, and that I highly recommend for the non-French speakers: "How quickly blood dries once it is deemed historical." In 1955, it wasn't history yet, it could still feel as a newsreel. But as it was already making up for posterity, the purpose was already to remind people that routine for Camp prisoners was made of slavery, random executions, rifle scopes, barking German shepherds and soldiers on a perpetual night and fog.
And if fog can clear, if the darkest clouds can leave the sky to let the sunshine return, if a Camp can be liberated, nothing could ever liberate the survivors from the vivid trauma forever engraved in their memories, from their 'night and fog' as states of mind. As for us, all we can do is to share a part of this trauma, as a tragic but necessary heritage of our Human civilization.