Night and Fog is a seminal work in documenting the Holocaust in its raw inhumanity. How does the filmmaker capture this? How does Resnais choose to represent war and the Holocaust in unique ways? Think about the visual and aural approaches.

Filmed in 1955, Night and Fog remains one of the most haunting pieces of war aftermath a person can see. To capture the aftereffects of the war, film director Alain Resnais used scenes of the abandoned Holocaust camps filmed in color to juxtapose the harsh black and white scenes of the camp during its active days of World War II (Barnouw 180). Though the scenes Resnais switches back and forth from are filmed in different time periods, the camp and the inhumanities that took place there still take center stage in Night and Fog. As a documentary, the movie takes its audience back in time by using scenes they were just introduced to and transitioning quickly to black and white film.

The style of the documentary is a particularly powerful way to show the inhumanity of the Holocaust. The color scenes show empty bunkers and rooms that hide their dark past through minute details. The scene in which the camera walks the audience through an empty gas chamber becomes even more disturbing when the shot focuses in on the fingernail scratches in the ceiling. The horrified audience is then shown black and white film of the gas chamber being used. It is a grotesque history lesson, but one with a purpose and message to send. The narration helps with this message, and becomes one of the most important features in Night and Fog.

The effects of the war and its aftermath are explained to the audience with the help of the unseen, but heard narrator. His voice carries authority, but maintains a neutral and emotionally distanced level of inflection. The images in the film are emotional enough to move the audience without the encouragement of the narrator, and Resnais decided well when choosing to have the narrator depend on facts about the Holocaust when explaining a scene. The emotions that Resnais conveys through the background music are not always the obvious one, but it still works within the film since the topic can be overwhelming at times. The music only encourages the pace of the scene, not the type of emotional response. It takes an untraditional approach, but it helps the audience refocus at times on what the narrator is saying. This encourages the audience to form their own opinions of the inhumanity within the scenes they are shown and come to their own conclusions about what is means to be valued as a living human being. Resnais shows the war and Holocaust as dehumanizing events for everyone involved, and effectively disturbs any romanticism that developed in the decade after its occurrence.