Nuit et brouillard

This extraordinary film was, of course prohibited during the years that Argentina was ruled by the military dictatorship. Only one man, dared to show it in the middle of mass genocide. This teacher, Manlio Pereira, was the director of the only private film school during the late ´70s. Obviously the school received strange invasions of military spies, but Pereira not only continued to show this masterpiece, but also made a great ceremony out of it, speaking loudly and profoundly of what nazism meant, what were it terribly effects, and why Argentina has falled again in the taste for this awfull criminal behaviour. It is a shame that not always such outstanding names like these are remembered for this little great things.

I originally had no intention to see this movie and had no idea that it even existed until I saw it. I actually saw it in High School Economics class (of all places)because my teacher had just finished showing it to his world history class and instead of wanting to hear him drone on about the GDP and recessions, we smooth talked him into showing us what was in his VCR. We had no idea what we were about to see.

This movie is probably the best holocaust documentary ever made. The images of piles of human hair, emaciated skeletons being pushed around by bulldozers, lampshades of human skin, men looking like corpses walking around, has never left me. The opera and classical music in the background helps to further add to the shock value of this film.

After about 10 minutes, kids in my class told my teacher we didn't want to watch this movie anymore. We stopped it and there was still 30 minutes left in class. We didn't learn anything about economics that day, we talked about the holocaust instead.

Alain Resnais' overwhelming short piece on the horrors of the holocaust pretty much had me shaking by the end of the film. All of the footage- even the color footage viewing into the emptiness of the camps- brings the audience to feel a mass of emotions. More than anything, however, the narration is what hits the nail on the head. While it's only half an hour long, rather brief compared to it's dramatized contemporaries like Schindler's List and The Pianist, or the massive documentaries like Sorrow and the Pity or Shoa, I'd think that it should be required viewing for any mature minded person (not for children, it's too disturbing from my perspective) interested in truly comprehending what was really going on in those god-awful years in Europe. A+

Resnais intersperses then-current-day (1955) color footage of Auschwitz with archival B&W to demystify and provide context for the Holocaust in modern western society rather than in anything unique to the German experience of totalitarianism. Photos of concentration camp personnel at home with their families invite the viewer to reflect on the banality of evil. Construction of the camps is described as like that of any large project, requiring bids, architects, contracts. Heart-wrenching scenes document a prisoner's view, from the transports being loaded through selections, showers/gas chambers, existence in the barracks, and in the end, mass death.

Included on the DVD is an excerpt from a 1994 radio interview with Resnais, wherein he mentions French censors required the film makers to obscure the hat of a policeman guarding prisoners being deported - the French government refused to permit this recognition of French complicity and assistance with the deportations.

I had heard the phrase "Night and Fog", but had missed the true meaning of it until I saw this movie sitting on a shelf in a local video store. I rented it and watched.

I don't possess a vocabulary to convey the impact the images had upon me. I sat unmmoving, sick to my stomach. Those images would not leave my head.

As a student of history, I had seen still images and brief clips of the victims of the Holocaust. None of it compared to seeing these images moving across my screen.

To any doubters of the Holocaust, I say, "Watch this film!" It did happen. This is the result of hatred and complacency. We like to think it couldn't happen here, until we remember the treatment of the Native Americans and the slaves brought to this country. We think it could never happen again, until Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, Rwanda, etc., showed it still does.