A joke has long circulated that, if one were to watch every film, documentary, and TV special about World War II, then it would take longer than war actually lasted. This isn’t true, of course, as the war lasted from the fall of 1939 until Hitler’s death in April of 1945, so it would take about 25,000 films to fill that time. But we may, as a society, eventually reach that point.
It’s important to consider and reconsider and re-reconsider WWII as often as we may, because that war – a world war, mind you – was a profound violation of everything about the human condition. WWII was more than a conflict, it was a betrayal of every facet of human thinking. Before the war – if one were to read the epoch’s philosophy – it looked as if humanity was staggering toward a self-satisfied enlightenment, and we were on the fast track to utopia. WWII took philosophy and turned it into violence. Politics became monstrous demagoguery. Technology became atomic bombs. And national identity split us further apart than ever. To this day, humanity is still hurting from the deep, confused philosophical scars left by the Nazi regime. We may never truly understand how we let it get that bad, and at that late a date.
Argos Films
Alain Resnais’ seminal 1955 documentary Night and Fog, now available on a Criterion Blu-ray, remembers the confusion, and still feels the blind, hurt outrage at humanity’s betrayal of itself. It was made a decade after the war ended, but it insists that the memory should remain fresh. The horrors of war should never ever – in Resnais’ mind – be relegated to dry texts and tearjerking melodramas. Although it only runs a mere 33 minutes, all of Resnais’ repulsion and hate for what had happened is on full display.
Night and Fog, narrated by Michel Bouquet, skips back and forth between the past and the present, showing calm exteriors of eerily peaceful buildings out in the German and Dutch countrysides, and juxtaposing them with Nazi-shot footage of the atrocities of what happened inside of them. The buildings are concentration camps at Auschwitz and other locales. The amount of death produced by those buildings and by the people running them is unfathomable.
Argos Films
But Resnais’ will try to make you fathom them. He will show you the stark, brutal, ugly death, right up close. We’ll see emaciated people being piled into pits. We’ll see the human remains. We’ll see the equipment used to turn their various body parts into soap and blankets. The most horrifying thing about Auschwitz is how well-thought-out and well-organized it was. If you get it into your mind to murder literally millions of people, this seems like the most efficient way to do it.
In 1955, France – very much like America – was in a flush period of high patriotism. The producers of Night and Fog were initially asked to construct a film about the glories of the French Resistance. At the time, the genocide of the Jews was not very widely talked about. A producer named Anatole Dauman teamed up with Resnais – who had yet to begin making masterpieces like Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima, Mon Amour) – to finally expose, starkly, the horrors. The title, taken from a quote from Himmler, alludes to the surreptitious nature and strange obscurity of the vastness of the genocide.
Argos Films
Since its inception, Night and Fog has been serving its purpose. Despite several flirtations with censorship, the film has been shown at festivals, and even on French television, where its images of real death serve as a reminder of what happens when everything goes horribly wrong. In 2003, it was fully restored by the Criterion Collection, and its legacy now continues on Blu-ray.
Is the film full of ugly and terrible things? Yes. That’s the point. But this is no wallow in misery. This is no penance or awkward melodrama. It’s not a beatific call to peace either. It’s a reminder to ourselves of what war really looks like. Resnais’ is attempting to shock-rally a nation into outrage, and perhaps express, from the depths of the human soul, just how badly we disappointed ourselves.
Top Image: Argos Films
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
