Night and Fog () is a 1956 French documentary short film. Directed by Alain Resnais, it was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The title is taken from the Nacht und Nebel (German for "Night and Fog") program of abductions and disappearances decreed by Nazi Germany. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek established in occupied Poland while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. Night and Fog was made in collaboration with scriptwriter Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. The music of the soundtrack was composed by Hanns Eisler.
Resnais was originally hesitant about making the film and refused the offer to make it until Cayrol was contracted to write the script. The film was shot entirely in the year 1955 and is composed of contemporary shots of the camps plus stock footage. Resnais and Cayrol found the film very difficult to make due to its graphic nature and subject matter. The film faced difficulties with French censors unhappy with a shot of a French police officer in the film, and with the German embassy in France, which attempted to halt the film's release at the Cannes Film Festival. Night and Fog was released to critical acclaim, and still receives very high praise today. It was re-shown on French television nationwide in 1990 to remind the people of the "horrors of war".
Plot
Night and Fog is a documentary that alternates between past and present, using both black-and-white and colour footage. The first part of Night and Fog shows remnants of Auschwitz while the narrator Michel Bouquet describes the rise of Nazi ideology. The film continues with comparisons of the life of the Schutzstaffel to the starving prisoners in the camps. Bouquet shows sadism inflicted upon the doomed inmates, including scientific and medical experiments, executions, and rape. The next section is shown completely in black-and-white, and depicts images of gas chambers and piles of bodies. The final topic of the film depicts the liberation of the country, the discovery of the horror of the camps, and the questioning of who was responsible for them.
Production
Background and development
From 1954 to 1955, a number of activities took place in observance of the tenth anniversary of the liberation of France and of the concentration camps. One of these was an exhibition curated by Olga Wormser and Henri Michel, Resistance, Liberation, Deportation, which opened on 10 November 1954 at the Institut Pédagogique National (National Teaching Institute) in Paris. The exhibit was based on Michel and Wormser's monograph, which had been published earlier in 1954 in a special issue of Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. The first public notice of a proposed film project was given during a radio broadcast on 10 November 1954, the opening day of the exhibition.
Although Michel was under pressure from veterans' organizations to create a film that would honor French Resistance fighters, Wormser argued for a scholarly approach that would show the concentration camps as a systematic microcosm of the German war economy. Michel recognized that this approach would enable broader financing, and both re-envisioned the film as "communicating historical research through contemporary media." Initially, Michel thought the film could take the form of a montage of news reports. But as a result of the exhibit Resistance, Liberation, Deportation, both he and Wormser had received many items created by former inmates during their internment. They came to believe that they could create a unique perspective by providing an inside view of the camps.
"The genocide of the Jews was treated in French remembrance as more of a side issue—something that was in any case supposedly a matter for the Jews themselves and not for the majority of society. Michel and Wormser might have wanted scholarly objectivity instead of the heroism favoured by the deportees' association...but nevertheless the Holocaust had remained a blind spot even for them."
Film producers Anatole Dauman, Samy Halfton, and Philippe Lifchitz were invited to this exhibit and felt that a film should be made on the subject. Anatole Dauman, originally from Warsaw, undertook the production for Argos Films and arranged for co-financing by Films Polski, the Polish state production company. Dauman approached filmmaker Alain Resnais, who had experience with documentary films since 1948. For more than a week, Resnais resisted the offer, believing that only someone with first-hand experience of concentration camps should attempt the subject matter.