Night and Fog
France, 1955; 31 mins.
Directed by Alain Resnais
Script by Jean Cayrol
Score by Hanns Eisler

Almost half a century after it appeared this classic film is still widely regarded as the starting point for any visual representation of the Holocaust. Some consider it a "cinematic poem". To French director François Truffaut it is "not a documentary, or an indictment, or a poem, but a meditation on the most important phenomenon of the twentieth century". The film opens with an eerie lyricism, and for the most part it maintains an unexpected, seductive gentleness and delicacy of tone on the soundtrack. Much of its power, in fact, comes from tension between what we hear -- the thoughtful, generally mild-mannered voice-over and music -- and the increasingly upsetting images on the screen. The makers of this film understood better than almost any who followed them that, if the images of the Holocaust were mounted properly and explained only to the necessary minimum, they would be so powerful that less could be more on the soundtrack. By avoiding melodramatic or histrionic effects, the film somehow achieves a kind of broader human meaning -- "hope", according to the composer of the film's score.

The two main sources of images for this film (and most other Holocaust documentaries) are contemporary ones:  the photographic and cinematic files of the German authorities themselves, and pictures taken by the liberators of the camps.  In Night and Fog this material is artfully blended with meditative shots of Auschwitz standing silent and empty in the 1950s -- these shots filmed in color, unlike the black-and-white of the past.

In 1955 director Alain Resnais (b. 1922) was known for a small number of trenchant and original documentary films with high intellectual content. His expertise shows: watch for what the camera movement and camera angles have to say, and the way the cuts force moral alertness on us. Later Resnais made  a dozen or so idiosyncratic but successful feature films, beginning with the enduring classics Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961).  The author of the words we hear, Jean Cayrol, was a Catholic poet of a philosophical bent, and a camp survivor. The Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, who lived in emigration during the war, was noted for his collaboration on stage works with fellow-Communist Bertholt Brecht as well as for his classical compositions.  If you listen closely you'll pick up his ironic and subversive use of Deutschland über alles.

The title of the film (in French, Nuit et Brouillard) comes from the German expression "bei Nacht und Nebel", applied to something done secretly, in deliberate obscurity. Here its reference appears to be different, to the utter isolation, disorientation and hopelessness of the victims. Thus the film's concluding message concerns man's inhumanity to man and calls on us never to let any such thing happen again.

The film has one startling oddity that not everyone notices on the first viewing. While the viewer knows that most victims of the death camps were Jewish, and many victims seen in the film can be identified as Jewish (by the yellow star, for instance), the film never tells us this. The word "Jewish" occurs once in the voice-over, in a limited context. (Neither does the film explicitly identify the perpetrators as German.) The director and writer appear to have had two reasons for not mentioning the Jews explicitly.  For one thing, they wished to reach French audiences of the mid-1950s, who were disinclined to privilege the suffering of the Jews during the war over their own sufferings. But the filmmakers' larger reason was that they wished to speak not about racism and genocide, but rather about the modern industrialized brutality practiced by the Nazis. The film is about the camps, not about the Holocaust. Does this limit the power of the film for us? Each of us must decide.