Night and Fog
Night and Fog (1955) is one of the most important documentaries about the Holocaust. This 1955 film by Alain Resnais, a famous French director, was the first post-World War II documentary to focus on the history of the Holocaust as a central theme. Resnais combines archive footage of the deportations and the liberated camps with footage of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1955. While the archive footage is in black-and-white, the current footage is in color. Together with the very intense commentary of Jean Carol, a French survivor of Mauthausen concentration camp together with the powerful music score of the German composer Hanns Eisler the film re-enforce the story of the deportation and annihilation of the European Jews by the German Nazis. This is also an essay about the necessity and boundaries of memory – even in film.
The documentary caused several scandals, including at the 1956 Cannes film festival, where the German ambassador intervened against the screening of the film because of “anti-German” tendencies. Nevertheless, the film was released in West-Germany with a commentary written by the famous German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, then distributed by the German government in schools. Later a second German version of the film was released in the GDR.
Tobias Ebbrecht, Film and Television Academy ‘Konrad Wolf”, mediacritique@web.de
