Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, French filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz in his harrowing documentary. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet, empty buildings with wartime footage. Using a combination of archival materials from past and present, in color and black and white, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of humanity’s violence and presents the unsettling suggestion that such atrocities could happen again.
