Review for Night and Fog

WARNING: Some of the images captured from the DVD for this release are extremely disturbing.

Released concurrently with Renais 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' you could be forgiven for wondering why such a short film (running at just over 31 minutes) would be released as an individual disc in its own right, and not an extra on the longer feature. Having viewed 'Night and Fog' for the first time, I can now fully understand why. Though in some respects a straight-forward (though intensely shocking) documentary, due to its sensitive subject matter it would certainly seem wrong to delegate it to a secondary position behind any other feature. You need to see this film to understand why.


I am familiar with Alan Renais only through watching his mesmerising and dreamlike surrealistic master-piece, 'Last Year at Marienbad', a film as baffling as it is is wonderful (the cinematography is beautiful, the narrative completely hat-stand). But 'Night and Fog' is far from that. It is a straight-forward documentary that makes no attempt to either sensationalise or play down the atrocities of the holocaust.


The approach Renais takes to the subject matter is straight-forward enough, but it is the narration that charges the grotesque imagery with such emotion. This slightly philosophical, almost poetic approach to the narration seems to be either a feature of the middle 1950's - or French documentary making - or both. The emotive descriptions of what we are seeing (softly voiced by actor Michel Bouquet) reminded me very much of the early Jacques Cousteau narrations from his documentaries of the same period.


The film starts off on some long-tracking , contemporary shots (in 1955) of the abandoned concentration camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek.

The words spoken are those of Jean Cayrol, a survivor of a camp, whose poem 'Nuit et Brouillard' gave the film its provocative title. It's a moving mix of the grotesquely factual (references to the 'business-as-usual' tenders for building the camps, or ladies bags made from the skin of victims) and the deeply philosophical questions about how such a thing could happen - particularly when everyone involved denied any responsibility after the war ('I was only following orders').


It's immensely difficult viewing. From seeing children and parents being separated at rail stations before being forced to travel like human cattle to the camps brough tears to my eyes. As did the lines of naked women and children being forced to line up for the industrial showers that would be their death. Or the starving, disease ridden men kept alive merely for hard labour or sick medical experimentation, or the slightly better fed women kept alive merely to serve in camp brothels, or the chilling reality of human remains being used to create every-day items like lamp-shades and shaving brushes.


By the final third of the film we are exposed to scenes so disturbing that once seen they surely can never be forgotten. Piles of open-eyed corpses, with their emaciated bodies thrown together in giant burial mounds, from footage taken by the allies when they arrived to liberate the camps, being watched by survivors whose eyes seem to give off no more emotion than a dead fishes. And yes - now I'm doing it. Searching for words to get even half-way towards expressing the disgust, the horror and the disbelief that one human being could do this to another.


30 minutes seems to be the perfect length to raise awareness without completely draining the viewer. I was shell-shocked by the film. Despite the majority being black and white footage from more than 65 years ago, the impact of the juxtaposition of shots and narration is immense. This is heavy stuff - dark, confusing and tragic.


Presented in its original full frame (1.33:3), Night and Fog is a mixed bag - using archive footage in various states of dis-repair and occasionally badly shot or out of focus. At other times, the footage is shockingly clear. The mono soundtrack is original French with English sub-titles.

There are no extras on the disc, which is disappointing as the Criterion edition from a few years back had some interesting supplementary material.

This isn't a disc that anyone is going to enjoy watching. But it's possibly one that everyone should see once.