Night and Fog

Tonight's viewing of Alain Resnais's Night and Fog may be the first time (barring Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema) I've willfully exposed myself to anything Holocaust-related in over three years. After being totally desensitized to the issue from discussing the war, etc. in at least one class every trimester for most of my first two years in college, I had to take a serious break. A lot of the problem I have with art dealing with the Holocaust is that the images and descriptions are so immediately overwhelming that my brain just shuts out the information or ignores it as absurd and surreal.

Night and Fog, though, due to its brevity (31 minutes), elliptical nature, and counterposed soundtrack felt more effective than pretty much anything else I've experienced. The dry, deceptively straightforward-sounding language reminded me of Vonnegut's approach to describing tragedy/atrocity; it humanized those in the camps more than heavily dramatic prose and the inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth that come so automatically to most people working on the subject. Resnais uses color photography to place the ruins of the camps, shot in 1955 or 1956, in a recognizable European landscape--important when the footage from the camps shows them to be an almost unbelievable black-and-white hell.