Night and Fog by Alain Resnais

Category: Non-English

I've been told a lot about this film by people around me and until I actually got around to watching it and...

Well obviously tons of quick thoughts on this film, Resnais uses a daunting score, a strong narrative and a narrator who is as cold as the harsh realities of the concentration camps set up during the second world war. He juxtaposes present day footage with that of the old archival footage he managed to lay his hands on. The result is an interesting blend of reality, documentation and of course cinema. The 31 minute documentary as it's pegged in some places is very far from a documentary since most French New Wave directors found calling a movie a "documentary" to be problematic. Who is doing the documentation?

Obviously the "in your face images" are very hard to take in and even though it's not as atrocious as the stuff they show in cinema today it's one of the hardest films I have had to sit through. Mostly because all of this stems from events based in our world. This movie brings to mind the Roberto Benigini film, Life is Beautiful. A movie in which the concentration camps are shown to be a little boys fantasy game played with his father, to think that anyone would want to downplay the relentless and brutal treatment meted out to the inmates of such a place is atrocious.

Back to the movie, it's obviously worth watching, but what Resnais does with reality and this film is remarkable, he doesn't make any bones that this is far from what reality actually was but how does one actually capture what happened then? There are some questions which even the normal fellow watching this will get, such as a "Who is responsible for this". Try moving past that. Creation of the sound track is also important as that forms a major arch of the film itself, do some research before actually watching this, it shall be rewarding.

Note: This was made about 10 years after the liberation of the concentration camps.

Recommendation level: 5/5.