Watching the film “Night and Fog,” was difficult, as is anything on the Holocaust. The footage used in this film was extremely graphic, but I imagine the intention of this filmmaker was to evoke a intense sense of grief from his viewers. I was surprised to see how short this documentary was when I began watching it, however I realized that he only needed a short span of time to tell this story and create the resounding impacts he intended.
In high school and in some of my college courses, we viewed several videos and read primary and secondary texts on the Holocaust, however very few had the same effects as “Night and Fog.” Some of the footage in this film I had never seen before, and it was difficult to get through without turning my head away in horror. The narrator in this film is never shown, which is different from most documentaries. The images and video content were enough to drive the film and tell the story.
The silent shots force the viewer to feel for themselves the heaviness of the grief experienced by so many. In the article “Documenting the Inevitable,” by Sandy Flitterman Lewis, she states that “recognizing that the ‘truth’ of an event always exceeds the documented fact, Renais attempts to locate those other tribunaries of meaning and association (social, personal, ideological, emotional, philosophical, ethical/moral, national/cultural) through a metaphoric play of contrasts and opposition that includes the viewer in the very definition of the meaning itself…” The contrasts of shots and narration versus silence were done purposely to confront the viewer with the feelings associated with an event this traumatic and dehumanization of an entire group of people. “The haunting sense of absence produced by the camera’s relentless track across deserted space is continually put into revision with the finite temporality of the documentary shots, providing the viewer with a space in which to consider the enduring effects of the specific historical movements.”
This documentary definitely had these impacts on me, and left me with an intense emotional response.