One of the reasons I strongly believe that horror as a genre reliant of monsters, gore, and mayhem, is dead (or if not, in the ICU) is because no matter how horrible the story, how dark and disturbing the elements that shape it, they cannot and will not hold even a remote candle to the images shown in Alain Resnais' ground-breaking documentary NIGHT AND FOG. Thirty minutes is all it takes to show where exactly those train tracks, now overgrown with weeds, led to. Thirty minutes is what he as a director needs to bring forth imagery so frightening, so nerve-racking, so stomach-wrenching, that once the credits roll, all I could do is sit there (as I did), sweat profusely, suddenly feel like I was watched by these mutilated people who went through the unimaginable, and feel the insane need to take a cleansing shower.
NIGHT AND FOG is cinematic excess, but necessary in order to make its message clear. It's a terrible poem that offers no answers and alternates between its sunny, autumnal color images that celebrated ten years of the end of the Holocaust, to the stark, near abstract horror courtesy from the Nazi's own archived footage that has some of the most brutal testimonies of what man can do to another man due to his race and religion. Proceeding at a near-silent pace, with only a soft string arrangement overheard in the background, NIGHT AND FOG discloses all of its secrets, one by one, pummeling the viewer with unrelenting force. Showcasing a myriad of end results from the endless torture the Jews received from the hand of Nazi Germany, it becomes a Boschian nightmare. One of the most intolerable sequences shows tractors scooping up mutilated bodies and burying them in pits, followed by a hill of human hair (the Nazi's saved everything, we are told; for future use) later used for fabric, skin used as paper (some already showing drawings of elegant ladies), bones used (unsuccessfully) as fertilizer, and bodies in labs, severed from their heads (all piled up like perverse olives in a plate), bodies later used as soap. Surrealism taken into its darkest and most nihilistic moment. NIGHT AND FOG is a terrible glimpse into an abyss that threatens to open its frightful eyes and stare right back at you.
NIGHT AND FOG is cinematic excess, but necessary in order to make its message clear. It's a terrible poem that offers no answers and alternates between its sunny, autumnal color images that celebrated ten years of the end of the Holocaust, to the stark, near abstract horror courtesy from the Nazi's own archived footage that has some of the most brutal testimonies of what man can do to another man due to his race and religion. Proceeding at a near-silent pace, with only a soft string arrangement overheard in the background, NIGHT AND FOG discloses all of its secrets, one by one, pummeling the viewer with unrelenting force. Showcasing a myriad of end results from the endless torture the Jews received from the hand of Nazi Germany, it becomes a Boschian nightmare. One of the most intolerable sequences shows tractors scooping up mutilated bodies and burying them in pits, followed by a hill of human hair (the Nazi's saved everything, we are told; for future use) later used for fabric, skin used as paper (some already showing drawings of elegant ladies), bones used (unsuccessfully) as fertilizer, and bodies in labs, severed from their heads (all piled up like perverse olives in a plate), bodies later used as soap. Surrealism taken into its darkest and most nihilistic moment. NIGHT AND FOG is a terrible glimpse into an abyss that threatens to open its frightful eyes and stare right back at you.