Night and Fog

Director: Alain Resnais Alain Resnais

Overview

Night and Fog represents the peak of director Alain Resnais' activities as a short-subject filmmaker. Framed as a documentary, the film is an unsettling view of life inside the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. As he would in his later features (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad et. al.) Resnais toys with chronology, with memory becoming present reality and vice versa at several critical junctures. Jean Cayrol, later responsible for the script of Resnais' Muriel (1962), wrote the narration for Night and Fog. The film was originally released in France as Nuit et Brouillard.

Product Details

Release Date:	07/19/2016
UPC:	0715515181518
Original Release:	1955
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[B&W, Color]
Time:	0:32:00
Sales rank:	14,035

Special Features

New 4k digital transfer with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; Excerpt from a 1994 audio interview with Director Alain Resnais; New interview with filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer; Face aux fantomes, a ninety-nine minute 2009 documentary featuring historian Sylvie Lindeperg that explores the French memory of the Holocaust and the controversy surrounding the film's release ; Plus: An essay by film scholar Colin MacCabe

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Michel Bouquet

Narrator

Technical Credits

Jean Cayrol

Alain Resnais	Director
Jean Cayrol	Screenwriter
Jasmine Chasney	Editor
Ghislain Cloquet	Cinematographer
Henri Colpi	Editor
Hanns Eisler	Score Composer
Chris Marker	Asst. Director
Sacha Vierny	Cinematographer

Editorial Reviews

An almost unbearably powerful film, Night and Fog is a shattering cinematic experience. Alain Resnais' documentary revisits his familiar theme of memory and its impact upon the present to provide an effective frame for the horrors that were perpetrated in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. A beautiful blue sky may balance against a lovely field of green in the present, but underneath the colorful blend is the black-and-white despair captured in photographs and footage from when the camps were in use. Resnais keeps the narration steady and level, letting the words describe the atrocities but keeping the voice (courtesy of narrator Michel Bouquet) relatively calm. This "normal" vocal approach contrasts with the staggering brutality of the images, driving home the fact that while your eyes may wish to believe that such things happen only in the most perverse of imaginations, the voice reminds you that, no, it happened in real life. Resnais and writer Jean Cayrot force us, by gentle means, to confront the gruesomeness of this past, and make it more immediate and shocking by detailing how some of the remains of the murdered were later used (in the creation of products such as soap). Night is breath taking as film, revealing a masterful use of the medium by Renais, but it is of even greater importance as a document of the inhumanity that humans can be capable of.

All Movie Guide - Craig Butler