Night and Fog (1956)

Original title

Nuit et Brouillard

Directed by

Alain Resnais

Genre

documentary film

Country

France

Runtime

32 min

Rated

M

Rating

8.3 of 10 from 570 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

The film shows the abandoned concentration camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek ten years after their liberation. It mixes color footage of the empty grounds with black-and-white archival material to describe how prisoners lived and died there.

sobersomberunflinchinghistoricalreflectivestarkdisturbingquietly devastating

What happens

Night and Fog (French: Nuit et brouillard) is a 1956 French documentary short film. Directed by Alain Resnais, it was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The title is taken from the Nacht und Nebel (German for "Night and Fog") program of abductions and disappearances decreed by Nazi Germany. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek established in occupied Poland while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. Night and Fog was made in collaboration with scriptwriter Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. The music of the soundtrack was composed by Hanns Eisler. Resnais was originally hesitant about making the film and refused the offer to make it until Cayrol was contracted to write the script. The film was shot entirely in the year 1955 and is composed of contemporary shots of the camps plus stock footage. Resnais and Cayrol found the film very difficult to make due to its graphic nature and subject matter. The film faced difficulties with French censors unhappy with a shot of a French police officer in the film, and with the German embassy in France, which attempted to halt the film's release at the Cannes Film Festival. Night and Fog was released to critical acclaim, and still receives very high praise today. It was re-shown on French television nationwide in 1990 to remind the people of the "horrors of war". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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