History is very significant to education, because without learning it, we are doomed to repeat ourselves. One of the scariest and most vital pieces of history is the holocaust. This subject is repeatedly taught in schools so that students understand just how horrific it is. Since this tragedy there have been several films that tried to represent the inhumanity that the victims suffered. Although Night and Fog was not the first of its kind, it was and still is one of the most gripping.

Night and Fog, as a whole, is a very powerful film. Resnais uses several different tools in order to convey his message. He starts out the film by looking at the abandoned camps through the barbed-wire fences. Even though grass has taken over the once desolate land, it is hard to escape the eerie feeling. As Resnais puts it, “the blood has dried, the tongues have fallen silent”. The film then cuts back into 1933 Germany, just before the start of World War II. The marching of German soldiers brings out the crowds of people to hail their fierce new government. We also take a look at the different styles of concentration camps that were designed as if they were houses. Along with these pictures are the words, “Architects calmly design the gates meant to be passed through only once”. Resnais uses words and pictures in a very articulate way that is meant to pull in the audiences attention. This is an excellent way to introduce such a strong subject because he shows the liberated camps and the before the prisoners arrived. Even when you see what the camps look like now, you are transported back in time and Resnais then does take us back in time.

Resnais uses this back and forth pattern of what happened to what is now throughout the film. This is a very effective tool, he advances this with the use of switching from black and white to color. As Barnouw puts it, “frequent shifts between black-and-white archive footage of the extermination camps, and sequences in warm color filmed…”(Barnouw 180). An example of this is with the train that the captives took to their camps. He shows film of massive amounts of people getting on the train and arriving to one of the camps. Then jumps forward to what the tracks look like now, where the gruesomeness of their arrival no longer exist.

Resnais then takes the viewer into the camp. As we go through their day to day life the only theme is that there was no hope. First of all they were barely fed not only that what they were fed was not real food. He shows pictures of what the Nazi’s had turned them into which was skeletons with skin. Then he shows in detail the many ways that they were executed. Taking the viewer into the gas chambers where you can still see the claw marks. Pictures of charred skeletons and bodies thrown in with wood. There are rooms filled with billions of their possessions and hair, never ending mountains of hair. One of the most horrifying images of the whole film is the human heads in a basket next to what was once their bodies. Then we see hundreds of thousands of corpses being thrown and bulldozed into giant pits on top of one another. All of this film Resnais probably got from footage that was captured and originally put into Gustav Garvin and Kosta Hlavaty’s film Jasenovac. 

This documentary is stomach churning but it is important to show so that people can know the inhumanity of this travesty. The message you leave the film with is that this is awful and disgusting and that this is not the first or the last genocide.