Horrible and Indelible Memories - Alain Resnais's "Night and Fog" ("Nuit et Brouillard")

As the few remaining survivors of the Holocaust diminish each year, the memories and our familiarity and understanding of this event fade into the background. We forget about the Nazi holocaust in our daily happenings, just as we generally ignore the holocausts in Rwanda in the 1990s and in the Sudan at this very moment. The notion of holocaust becomes an abstract, something most of us do not have to confront, and we all remember the notion as something that's indescribably evil, but without really thinking about how evil and awful they are.

It is for these reasons that the Criterion Collection production of Alain Resnais's "Night and Fog" is so important to all of us. Filmed and released fifty-one years ago, in 1955, only 10 years after the end of World War II, Resnais's work takes to Auschwitz as it looked in 1955, juxtaposing his color footage of the camp with archived black and white footage and photographs from Auschwitz and other concentration camps in the 1940s. It is, quite simply, one of the most powerful anti-war films ever, relying on the wake of the war to show the quotidian horrors of life during war.

The black and white sections trace the rise of the Nazis through the establishments of the camps and, in 1942, the institution of Hitler's "Final Solution". As is always the case, thanks to the Nazis' meticulous desire to document everything, we see footage of people herded in train stations, rounded up onto trains, and brought into camps. Resnais shows us his 1955 footage of the barracks, the prisons, the crematorium, juxtaposing these images with the same buildings in the 1940s black and white photographs, all to suggest the cyclical nature of violence in general while revealing the particular horror of Auschwitz.

The most important images in his documentary, however, are those showing the victims. As we watch people crammed into the trains, we ask ourselves, how many of them survived? Any? An old woman is being carted around near the trains, unable to walk, and you can't help but ask, did the SS kill her right there? How fast was her death? We see images of people pleading for food in the camps, too weak to do anything themselves. We see the bodies of victims, shot, leaning against the fences, trying to escape. We see the "hospitals" at the camps, where you see corpses, eyes frozen wide open in terror and shock. We see how the Nazis treated the bodies, images of burnt bodies, shot, starving, decapitated.

Through Resnais's work, and 61 years after the Second World War ended, the horrors of the Holocaust become fresh in our memories again. This is what makes Resnais's work so amazing, so powerful, and so important. You are forced to face true violence, truly inhumane acts, to witness human beings forced to the most degraded and impossibly inhumane conditions. In a world where we grow dull to the ultra-violence of so many films, where the daily news of civil war and the bombings of civilians elicits a "that's a shame," the horror and violence of the Holocaust comes through crystal clear. Resnais is not gratuitous in his use of images - if anybody is to be accused of gratuity, it is the Nazis. It is not the film, or the editing, that is vile - it is the very acts themselves. Not only this, but confronting this horror, Resnais knows that the memory of such events will eventually fade into the past, will become part of a general narrative, an abstract that we ideologically condemn without actually doing anything about it even when it faces us today. And thus, even while we recoil, we think of the Balkans in the 1990s, of Africa today, of who-knows-where tomorrow, and there's no comfort to be found, no reassurance that "this only happened once...never again."

Resnais knew the importance and impact of this in his film. The narration, written by Jean Cayrol, himself a Holocaust survivor, closes by commenting on the fading of the memory of Auschwitz even in 1955, of the ways in which people go about their lives even while war only temporarily sleeps, keeping one eye open and ready for death and violence in the future. Cayrol's narratiive is incredible, steady and calm in the face of all of the images and the memories he himself doubtlessly had to confront. And seeing the horrors, and knowing they exist today still, "Night and Fog" should be required viewing for everybody on this planet, regardless of race, creed, or nation.