Night and Fog

1
Night and Fog

• By Alain Resnais

2
Some Facts about the Film

• A short film made in 1955
• Filmed about and in Auschwitz
• Alain Resnais best known film
• Won critical acclaim
• He also made Hiroshima my Love

3
Controversial History to this Film

• Withdrawn from the 1956 Cannes Film Festival
• The French government did not want it to be an
  entry. Why?
• Ostensibly not to offend another participating
  country (i.e. Germany)
• Actually because the 1950s French government
  could not face French complicity in the Holocaust
• A French gendarme is visible briefly in a camp
  tower. (Covered in many versions of the film)

4
What to look for

• The French gendarme
• Cinematic techniques
• How does this film represent the Holocaust? Does
  it do a good job?
• Arbeit macht frei
• Appeals to the German peoples work ethic
• Work makes you free
• Purpose?

5
Narration

• By Jean Cayrol
• He wrote and narrates the film
• Former inmate Why is this important to the
  filmmaker?
• How would you characterize the narration

6
Final Paragraph of his Narrative

• And there are those of us who look concernedly
  at these ruins, as if the old concentration
  monster were dead in the rubble, those of us who
  pretend to hope before this distant picture, as
  if the plague of the camps had been wiped out,
  those of us who pretend to believe that all this
  happened long ago, and in another country, who
  never think to look around us, who never hear the
  cry that never ends.

7
Music

• By Hans Eisler
• Made the music for the Three Penny Opera
• Theme of German national anthem

8
Title Night and Fog

• From Richard Wagners Rheingold
• In German Nacht und Nebel
• Appropriate? Why? Why not?