Night and Fog
(1995) - Alain Resnais' meditation on the Holocaust
Hans Eisler's heartbreaking music exists like a wintry threnody throughout Alain Resnais' quiet film. The camera allows the viewer to revisit a tragedy which at the time, was only a decade old. The juxtaposition of color (present time) and black and white photography (past) creates a dialectic of horror opposed to silent indifference - the indifference of the universe to man's presence and the indifference of man to the fates of others, be it through ignorance, distance, forgetfulness or repression. The color scenes possess an added poignance in that the world the camera portrays is seemingly uninhabited. All we see are ruins -broken towers, slabs of concrete, dilapidated structures, rusted wire, an expanse of track on which no train runs, abandoned roads, everything overgrown with flowers or weeds. The black and white images are from newsreels. Their impact when first projected at the conclusion of the war can only be guessed at. Anyone seeing them in their original context must have gone away knowing that we were now living in a new world, a world of unlimited horror - true expulsion from the delusional Eden of Humanism. An audience today can only experience this through the additional component of the indifferent present - the beauty of ruin co-mingling with rampant growth. No one who sees the seemingly simple statement can come away unchanged.
- Michael Shepler