Notte e nebbia

I consider myself to have a fairly strong stomach- I've seen the results of traffic accidents and violent crimes, and like anyone else I have seen (via the TV) the horrors of war. But I was just totally unprepared for this. It was thirty harrowing minutes of a sight-seeing tour of hell.

It was so difficult for me to sit through that I was tempted to shut the DVD player off three times, but I told myself, "No, this is important. It has to be seen, if only as a reminder of what can happen when an inhuman world-view is fused to state-of-the-art technology." The Holocaust was far more (and worse) than simple mass-killing, awful as that is. It was a business decision, coolly and scientifically calculated, to destroy millions of innocents while reaping a profit from them- in death as well as in life.

The sight of the starved, broken bodies, the ghastly scenes taken in the medical labs in the death camps, the sight of little children being led by the hand to their last train ride. It is all so monstrous as to be indescribable.

I am glad I watched it. But I do not think that I'll be watching it ever again, and I give it a 10. It affected me that deeply.

If you want to describe or give your audience a feeling for the holocaust, or "Man's Inhumanity To Man", then this is the vehicle to use..Show it..be warned, it is so powerful, that you will never forget what you see, neither will any of your viewers..It is impossible to describe, intermixing l955 footage of Auchwitz Concentration Camp, with captured Nazi footage which the allies found at the end of the war, and the scenes of American and British troops liberating the camps...In French, with English subtitles.. and scenes that are unforgettable and horrific. Even the sad music of death from this film plays in my ears, and I have not seen it in 15 years. Once you hear it, you will know.

This is the one to show if you want people to understand the truth of what happened and the reason for its reaction in today's current events....It is shocking in a special way. I showed it to my classes. Students were warned, and told what was coming, they said it would be "nothing" By the end some were crying and moaning in horror...

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.

I stared at the wall for what seemed an hour. Time meant little to me. After watching Alain Resnais' 1955 Holocaust film, "Night and Fog," I struggled to remove my mind from Auschwitz. Images of death echoed in my head. Bits of poetic narration played over and over. "Who is responsible?"

I came about this film by accident. I am an English teacher, and currently my students are reading Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize winning memoir, "Night." Looking for a visual connection to the piece, I came across "Night and Fog." At 31 minutes, it appeared the perfect video complement to that devastating book. After watching the film in my dark, empty classroom, I realized the film offered so much more.

In a culture where violence and images of death are glamorized, "Night and Fog" serves a unique purpose. It cuts through the desensitized soul and puts us face-to-face with true, unadulterated evil. While many might suggest this is overkill, occasionally we need to do this if only to remind ourselves of man's potential to perpetrate the abominations this film so cruelly unveils. We need to force ourselves to confront such forces, if only to ensure the film's prophetic final lines do not become a reality. "Who is on the lookout...to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?"

This is the question which consumed me as I stared seemingly forever at the wall after the film ended. This is the question I want my students to ask. After much deliberation, I decided to show it, not as a history lesson, but as a moral lesson in the nature of evil. Great films get a strong reaction. Resnais' film is one of the greats.