Review of “Night and Fog” (1956)
The Holocaust and the danger of forgetting.
Shot in 1955. Somewhat pretentious; first we hear that words cannot describe what was manufactured from the bodies, then the narrator tells us. Resnais’s poetic innovation here, relative to the more prosecutorial war-crime documentaries that came out of WW2, is to juxtapose past and present and talk about the fragility of memory. A wise move in retrospect.
References here: Shoah (1985), “What Is Important for Children” (1996).