Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard)
Directed by Alain Resnais
Written by Jean Cayrol
1955/France
Argos Films
Repeat viewing/Hulu
#305 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
[box] Récitant/Narrator: With our sincere gaze we survey these ruins, as if the old monster lay crushed forever beneath the rubble. We pretend to take up hope again as the image recedes into the past, as if we were cured once and for all of the scourge of the camps. We pretend it happened all at once, at a given time and place. We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us and a deaf ear to humanity’s never-ending cry.[/box]
This is almost poetic in its sadness and very hard to watch.
The film contrasts banal color images of contemporary deserted concentration camps with highly graphic black-and-white still images and archival footage of the suffering of Holocaust victims.
I have seen this a couple of times before. You almost, but not quite, become desensitized to the horrific pictures of the dead and dying. It’s the details that killed me this time. There’s footage of a man taking an elderly lady in a wheelchair to the deportation train that I find heartbreaking in so many ways. And all the faces. And the poor bodies. Too much for me.
Clip
As ever the people who should see it won’t…..and would try very hard to make sure it wasn’t possible to be seen.
It might have been a hard watch but I don’t think you’d like the idea of being a person for whom that wasn’t the case.
One of the hardest things for me is to understand that there are human beings that get pleasure from making other humans suffer.
It is when the numbers get faces that the tragedy sinks in. This is so overwhelming that I found it very difficult to handle.
I have been to the holocoast memorial in Berlin, visited Theresienstadt, seen the memorial in Prague and been to Yad Vachem, but of all that it was the children drawings in Prague that hammered home the message.
This movie is so close to overkill that it would loose the audience if it was not for the faces.
Each face contains it’s own tragedy, it’s true. At the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC they have a whole part focusing on the life of one child.