Nuit et Brouillard (1955)

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Nuit et Brouillard (1955) – A. Resnais

There is no good time to watch such a film but one must watch it, as an act of moral courage and understanding. – and, of course, remembrance (as a possible protection against such things happening again).  Alain Resnais (like his assistant on this film, Chris Marker) often used time and memory as his themes, focusing on their emotional impact and on their distortions.  Here, as we examine horrifying footage from the Nazi concentration camps (and footage that is horrifying by implication) we are also shown how the camps look now, grassy and overgrown, abandoned, potentially forgotten.  The message is not to forget that this is possible, that mass-murder is happening now – for Resnais, the pointed allusion was to Algeria, for us today it is to Iraq and Syria, and other places we may be ignoring.  Of course, no single atrocity is as potent, terrible, terrifying, saddening, and soul-destroying (no adjective really works here) as the Holocaust, during which the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews and millions of others they thought undesirable. It is hard to watch the footage of the victims and to hear how they were tortured, but it is our moral responsibility to learn and to stop governments and individuals from setting off on this path ever again.