Subscribe for €30 and get one-year access to the 70+ films in our streaming library. This supports not only our magazine but also the filmmakers we represent.
Night and Fog
Nuit et brouillard
Ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the abandoned grounds of, among others, Auschwitz and Majdanek. The film combines poignant black-and-white archive footage of the Holocaust, such as mass graves, prisoners, and systematic destruction, with color footage of the empty camp grounds in 1955.
This contrast emphasises the devastation of the past against the silence of the present. Using documents, films, and photographs from German, Polish, and French archives, Night and Fog not only reconstructs historical events but also raises critical questions about collective memory and the tendency to forget.
Bio Alain Resnais
The career of Alain Resnais (1922-2014) extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films, which included Night and Fog (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. Resnais adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. His films frequently explore the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and his narratives use innovative formal structures.
Short as it is, Night and Fog has major contradictions that might be advanced as criticisms, but might also explain its extraordinary power. Its impetus had come from history and politics, a drive to record the evils of Nazism, and the film is determined to anchor the camps in that historical reality. But there is another level of reality that Cayrol’s poetic text aims to delineate: the veritable alternative world of the camps, a completely new form of existence on the edge of death. The text, spoken at Resnais’s insistence without emphasis or emotion, is undoubtedly one of the reasons that we are moved so directly. And much of the credit for this power may be due to Marker, a longtime friend and collaborator of Resnais’s. At the time, Marker worked at Éditions du Seuil, the company that published Cayrol, and when Cayrol delivered his first version of the commentary, far too long and almost unrelated to the images, it was to Marker that Resnais turned to produce a text that would play in counterpoint to the images. This text was then rewritten by Cayrol, but there is no doubt that the astonishing rhythm of words and images owes a lot to Marker’s intervention.
427
- This film was #4 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025voted by Gerard-Jan Claes, Maike Höhne, Affonso Uchôa, Florian Fernandez, José Emilio González, Wouter Jansen, Didi Cheeka, Salome Lamas, Veton Nurkollari, Rubén Corral Giménez, Jason Tan Liwag, Ron Ma, Matías Piñeiro, Ivan Ramljak, Paul Landriau, Neil Young, Farid Rodriguez Rivero, Daniel Mattes, Inge Coolsaet, Ngọc Duy Lê, Călin Boto, Matti Ullrich, Sebastian Apel, Hannes Wesselkämper, Anna Feistel, Edith van der Heijde, Per Fikse, Wim Vanacker, Miguel Dias, Henni Berger, Christoffer Ode, Vincent Förster, Eneos Çarka, Jason Anderson, Angelika Ramlow, Dario Oliveira