ET 2 - Myself as an audience watching Night And Fog

A few weeks prior, Mr Rey, my lecturer popped in a CD, told us it was gonna be a WWII documentary, warned us it was gonna be pretty gruesome, then told us to kick back and watch the film.This film is a 1955 French documentary short film directed by Alain Resnais. This film was shot 10 years after the liberation of the Nazi's camp, and documents the lives of prisoners inside the camp. Night And Fog was made in collaboration by two survivors of the Holocaust, including writer Jean Cayrol and composer Hanns Eisler. Thats about it for the background of the film, now onto the contents of the film, huzzah !

The documentary starts with an extreme long shot (ELS) depicting the location of the former camps. The narrator, a survivor of the camp, who just happens to be a poet, starts narrating in what sounds to me like a robot droning, about how anything you see in the beautiful scenery can lead to a concentration camp. He goes on for quite a bit about this, like how names like Dachau and Auschwitz may sound like places where you want to visit at least once in your lifetime, but they are actually (gasp!) concentration camps and etc. He then proceeds to talk about the rise of the Nazis and the architecture style of the concentration camps. Why such random topics? Because he's a poet, that's why.

Anyway, he moves on to the completion of the camps, and the deporting of non-Aryans to the camps, in that order. By cross cutting the film, we see the deportation happening simultaneously all over Europe, in places like Athens, Zagreb and Odessa. After being packed into trains like sardines in a can, the prisoners are then sent to the camps. The trains usually arrive at the camps in the dead of night, usually in the midst of murky fog, hence the namesake of the movie, which I personally think is a brilliant touch because really, can anyone come up with a cooler sounding name than that ?

In a really nasty Long Shot, we see the prisoners being stripped under the pretext of hygiene and in the words of the narrator "stripped of their pride in one stroke". The prisoners are then shaved, tattooed and numbered, marking them as cattle and being less than human. The narrator then speaks of the camp's hierarchy. The commandant oversees the camp's activities, and enforces the rules with the help of a few officers. These officers were usually common criminals and they received extra perks for being said commandant's thugs. By means of a tracking shot, we proceed to see the living quarters of the prisoners whilst the narrator speaks of the harsh living conditions and the brutal punishments the camp officers administered to them for the hell of it. The narrator then introduces us to a day in the life of a prisoner, which frankly, after he was through, made me swear to myself I wouldn't talk smack to my mom the next time she asks me to do house chores.

The narrator then goes on about how life is really bitchy in the camps. He goes on for quite a bit about this. In the meantime, we see how the interior of the camps look like through the camera. We also see the numerous slogans above the entrance of the camps, which in my opinion, serves no purpose other than to instill a sense of purpose (Irony much?) in the prisoners. And the film goes on in much the same vein with the narrator describing what went on within the confines of the camp. The liberation of the camps by the Allies brought about the end of the film, though none too soon for my female classmates, nauseated by the horrible shots of the prisoners.

This film is brilliant. Even though I didn't love the film, I thought it was brilliant. I loved the way the narrator narrating the prisoner's experiences in simple yet powerful words. I thought the shots of the camps, particularly those from inside the camp, really captured the essence of what the film was about. The film is in my opinion, about revelation, about disclosure, and the way the camps were exposed, it did just that. The shots of the prisoners, although old and faded, were stark enough to evoke emotion in even the hardest of hearts (me!) . This film isn't just your run-of-the-mill documentary, this film was shot just after WWII when emotions were still raw, wounds still fresh, thus the incredible spectrum of emotions the film manages to invoke, all the way from shock, to sympathy, to awe. Fair warning tthough, this film is most definitely not for the faint of heart !