Alain Resnais is the director of “Night and Fog”, a film documenting the evils of the Holocaust. The film is very crude, presenting disturbing images of the inhumanities that Jews suffered under the Nazi regime.

Night and Fog is different from other Holocaust movies and documentaries. The horror lived by Jews during this time is incomprehensible; nevertheless, most movies and documentaries about it try their best to make the audience understand the magnitude of this dark story. In “Night and Fog”, Resnais acknowledges that nobody can understand the horror and fear that Jews lived during the Holocaust, except for the people that lived through it. As a scriptwriter, Resnais chose a Jew who lived through the concentration camps. Resnais agrees on the importance that is for humanity to remember this era, learn from our past and avoid this type of evil in the future. Acknowledging that he couldn’t make people understand the magnitude of the Holocaust is one way this documentary is different from others. Resnais doesn’t try to exaggerate things or make it a horror story.  In many instances, the voiceover in the documentary explains how “words are insufficient” to convey the reality of the Holocaust. Crude images of piled corpses and children’s skulls or finger scratches on the cement walls of the gas chambers only provide the audience a superficial understanding of what happened in the concentration camps. This voiceover, filled with doubts and not giving room for opinion is different from other voiceovers or background narration, such as the one used by Flaherty. Flaherty, as opposed from Resnais, put himself in the commentary, the way he perceived and understood things. In “Nanook of the North” Flaherty also “created” scenes and portrayed a somewhat inaccurate eskimo’s life.

Another strategy that was developed by Resnais in this film is the superposition of colorful “current” images with the raw black-and-white footage taken during the Holocaust. These shifts keeps bring the audience back and forth between the postwar “tourist world” and the black and white reality where the dead corpses and tons of women hair are shown. Resnais complements these images by asking questions that allow the audience to have an inner reflection and to internalize what they are seeing and feeling. For 32 minutes, this documentary gives objective information and facts about the concentration camps, and this information is delivered in a form of an essay and filled with questions for inner thoughts.  I believe that the present images are used to represent the passing of time and to remind the audience that we have the need to remember this story. He objectively shows the areas where the concentration camps were, not trying to show the evil in them, but to display the emptiness left in those places, with walls that vibrate with remembrance and that a lot of people have forgotten about.

How should we value the veracity of documentary? According to some directors, such as Dziga Vertov, the purpose of motion pictures is not to portray a fictional image, which is based on a theatrical tradition and, as Vertov considers, is a “scabby substitute for life”. The purpose of a documentary is to depict an accurate portrayal of life; to teach the audiences about realities that they might be unaware without the need of them to experience them, at least on a first-hand basis.

An issue arises when we talk about documentaries. How objective can a documentary really be? How much veracity should we, as the audience, assume the documentary has? What is the documentarian trying to say, and what methods he is utilizing to get his point across? After all, we are seeing this “reality” through the scope of the filmmaker. Through a “mechanical eye” that shows us an edited, at least to one point, version of the truth. According to a study made by Center for Social Media, for documentarians, “ethical behavior is at the core of its principles”.  They try to “honor the viewer’s trust.” However, sometimes we just can’t tell how “real” the reality on our screen is. Filmmakers, reporters, and editors use certain “tricks” before releasing their work to the audience. These tricks, such as jump cuts, b-roll, and cross-cutting, give these professionals the flexibility to arrange different shots that might be of different people, scenarios, or time, in a continuous, coherent form that delivers the point in the form they want. How should we feel about this? On one side, because of these “tricks “, we understand what we see in a way that might not be the exact way it happened. What we think might have been a 3-minute work could have been filmed in a span of several hours or even days. On the other hand, the use of these “tricks” create a visual impact that the audience might find easier to digest, or more interesting, creating a bigger impact yet keeping a direct relation with reality. Furthermore, a documentary is not a news report. A documentarian relation with its topic and/or subjects is way more profound and intimate that that one of a reporter with its news.

Ever since the beginning of documentaries these manipulation of content has been happening. In “Nanook of the North”, recorded and edited by Robert Flaherty, we see what is supposed to be the everyday life of an Eskimo family. Traditional hunting with bow and arrows and fishing hooks. Isolation from society. But in reality, by the time Flaherty recorded this film, the actual life of Eskimo families was not exactly the way he portrayed it. Eskimo families were more civilized, more influenced by the “white men”. Hunting with rifles and being up to date with technology. Flaherty was trying to show the audience the traditional Eskimo family, the one he saw with his dad, who was an explorer, and this way Flaherty manipulated a reality and up to some point “tricked”  the audience, raising contradictory opinions when it comes to analyzing this film in its own time and

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