Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps' quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and Fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man's violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.

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I have since seen other films depicting the Holocaust, including "Schindler's List" and "Life is Beautiful," both of which were excellent. But "Night and Fog" is still the one work that will shake you to your marrow. I visited the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem in the late 70's, and the emotional experience was identical to and of the same wrenching caliber as watching "Night and Fog."

Truth is truth. We need to look at it, even when it would be more comfortable to turn away. Thank God someone like Resnais had the courage to tell the truth of the Holocaust in a ruthless and inescapable way that holds us all accountable. "Night and Fog" should give us all the courage to call evil by its name out loud when we see it, and to stand together to stop it.

This should be required viewing for everyone.

52 of 52 found the following review helpful:

Mindshattering, somber, disturbingOct 19, 2000
By jaglom
I can't quite explain the intensity and the power this film contains.

We talk about the Holocaust, we hear 6 million jews died, 12 million total, we may even see a film like Life is Beautiful, which scratches the surface to what went on inside the camps.

But nothing can prepare you for the sheer mindshattering power of this film.

It is a brief, stark film, shot in black and white and goes on for only a halfhour.

But instead of adding dramatic flourishes, or light intonations, it simply shows images of the horror that was the Holocaust. A musical score flows throughout the background as you are hit with an assault of image after image of what went on behind the camp gates.

You can watch the goriest film with practices 100x as bizarre, but they wont disturb you nearly as much as seeing an entire storeroom filled with hair cut off from the victims of this atrocity or pictures of human beings that stand there as mere skeletons.

The narrator shows incredible constraint in his tone and his line of comments. He simply provides a framework for the images and probes the viewer, "Why did this happen? How could we allow this to go on?"

Not for young children.

It stays with you. If it doesn't disturb you, if it doesn't deeply affect you, you may have to question the depth of your humanity.

44 of 44 found the following review helpful:

Horror brought HomeAug 07, 2000

They showed us 'Night and Fog' in school. I was 13. It hit me like a bag of bricks then as it does now. It's one thing to read a schoolbook that says there were 'atrocities'. It is quite another to see piles of hair, gold teeth, wedding rings, shoes piled high and to realize all their owners were already dead. Seeing for the first time the reality of hunger on a human being, seeing piled bodies. I had nightmares then, and I have them now. Several students left, sickened. We were all stunned....they had to send us all home. For about a week we just could not function in the, what we now realized, lavish American lifestyle. We never felt safe again. We had seen hell. I believe the librarian was fired for showing us this film at such a young age. I am 32 now, and it has never left me, this film...and its horrors.

36 of 38 found the following review helpful:

Disgusting + Disturbing = AccurateJan 06, 2006
By Kathryn Marcotte "teacher_of_minds"
I am an educator who, as part of a state-mandated curriculum, instructs high school sophomores in literary unit surrounding Elie Wiesel's Night. Often, the students have "knowledge" of the concentration and labor camps and for some, a bit of previous education in the history surrounding WWII and specifically, the Holocaust. But the biggest struggle I faced in leading this unit was not in the comprehension of the details, but in their ability to truly understand, to feel what must be felt when the topic is to be examined through Wiesel's eyes.

I can tell my students of a car accident, I can describe a car accident to them. Some may have even seen one in real life. But only those who have been IN one can truly relay an account of its impact, and even then, those people stand somewhat alone in the magnitude of their own account.

This film, born in 1955, ensures that anyone who speaks of the Holocaust will not stand alone in his or her experience. I do not censor the film; its beauty is in its 31-minute glory.

The camps WERE disgusting. They WERE disturbing. And what makes this film worthy of those two words is that it shows the camps in a light true to their existance. Unlike many accounts (and yes, even the "great" ones like Schindler's List) is that they often leave people feeling reactions toward only the story told. This film does not tell a story; it gives no promise of imparting a neatly packaged historic explination of events. It examines nothing; but it shows everything.

This film is vision. And viewers leave with the kind of knowledge obtained when a person experiences something firsthand. It doesn't teach fact, it conveys feeling. It envokes reaction, sometimes violent.

But to show the camps as anything less than graphic, disturbing, disgusting, haunting and harrowing would fail to tell the story at all.

My students hate the film when they see it, though most make no reaction until they see the bulldozers. There is always silence afterward. And with an unexplainable tenderness, they devour Night, often referring back to this film. It allows any further information they receive on the topic (in my class or in their history courses) to really have meaning. This film ensures that other stories, like Schindler's List and Night, will have the impact that can fade with decades of forgetfulness and ignorance.

I shudder to think that this movie could ever be received in any way other than negatively; that is its very intent. You are not to be entertained. You are not to have knowledge or fact confirmed. The agenda of this film is to disturb you, to make your stomach sink and your soul ache. You are not supposed to "forget" ever seeing it; it is supposed to stay with you longer than you could have ever dreamed it would.

Dark is humanity when fictional slasher movies are more accepted than nonfiction archivals.

19 of 19 found the following review helpful:

A film that needs to be seenOct 13, 2003
By Bryan A. Pfleeger
Alain Resnais Night and Fog is a film that needs to be seen by as many people as possible. This documentary short is more an essay on the nature of man than an exploration of the Holocaust.

Shot in simple black and white and vivid color the film blends a past and present view of the horror of Nazi Germany like no other film I've ever seen. A simple voiceover guides us on a tour of the concentration camps a mere ten years after their liberation. The images are haunting and graphic. The most startling commentary comes at the end of the narration. We are warned that the spector of war is always present, always lurking and that if we are not careful and do not remember the past the horror could return at any moment.

This is a Criterion DVD with relatively few extras. However the viewer does not need extras to feel the mind numbing impact of this film. Provided are a short excerpt from a Renais audio interview in 1994 and crew biographies compiled by Peter Cowie. There is also a music only soundtrack.

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