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.