Night and Fog

You can't tell from that picture, but that's Auschwitz as it stood in 1955, when Alain Resnais made Night and Fog, a short documentary about the Holocaust. Resnais' film is perhaps the most powerful document of that catastrophe I have ever seen, mainly because it declines to provoke our emotions too much. Resnais lets the facts speak for themselves. The film almost plays like a tour of the camps, with tracking shots slowly passing by bunks, toilets, or ovens, all with the same semi-detached air about itself. We learn how long it took to build a camp, how far the train journey was to get there, how many officers were present. We learn that there were jails(!) with cells that allowed neither standing up-right nor lying down. We learn that going to the toilet was a life and death experience; to pass blood meant it was over for you. We learn that German soldiers kept prisoners as sex slaves. We find that each camp was like a self sustaing city, with all the business and day to day life that entails. We find out that the wives of officers were bored, and that they wished the war would end soon. We see what's left of the camps. We look and fail to understand. We see German officers denying responsibility. "I was not responsible," say the men. "Then who is responsible?" replies the narrator. Taking his cues from Adorno ("there can be no poetry after Auschwitz"), Resnais declines any metaphysical comfort. He leaves us with only inexplicable facts.