Reviews and notes

NIGHT AND FOG was made as a production commissioned by the Comit? d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (Committee for the History of the Second World War), an official French organisation under the control of the prime minister. Resnais had access to the film material of the Committee's archives, to war archives in the Netherlands and in Poland, and to centres for documentation on Jews and other deported persons as well as to the museums in Auschwitz and Majdanek. And for the first time he presented to a large audience documents that had been recorded by the Allies in the concentration camps.

The title takes up a Nazi slogan directed against those opposing the system who were classified as particularly dangerous. With the help of photos and film shots Resnais reconstructs the horror that took place every day and the industrial functioning of the National Socialist death machinery. By creating a non-chronological montage from the colour pictures of the dreary present and the black-and-white shots of the terrible past, the French director manages to achieve the paradox of making a documentary film that is not only political and in a social context of the utmost importance but also one that succeeds aesthetically. Thus, NIGHT AND FOG also becomes a personal reply to the dictum of the philosopher Theodor W Adorno, who said that after Auschwitz art was no longer possible.

For Resnais the way from colour to monochrome is at the same time the way of the human memory because, as Resnais says, "when we remember something, we think a little bit in grey or at any rate in a less vivid colour". A completely black-and-white film, however, was not considered for fear of a "cinematographic romanticism" of the ruins on the grounds of the concentration camps.

For NIGHT AND FOG Resnais acquired two irreplaceable artistic comrades-in-arms: The emigrant Hanns Eisler, famous for the songs he wrote for the plays of Bertold Brecht, composed a score that created a contrapuntal tension to the cinematic images. The French writer Jean Cayrol, himself a survivor of the concentration camp in Mauthausen, succeeds in setting down a poetic as well as a political commentary, which determines the rhythm of the cinematic images and intensifies their effect from the point of view of an eyewitness. The text emphasises the timelessness and transferability of events and, in view of the struggle for liberation in Algeria at that time, is a warning against new executioners. For the German dubbed version, the German lyric poet Paul Celan, who frequently translated from French, created a congenial free rendering that can stand comparison with the original. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 there was a scandal surrounding NIGHT AND FOG when, at the instigation of the German government, the film was removed from the festival programme.
- Looking at Germany, Goethe Institut, 2000.

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