According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Night and Fog is a secret order under which “persons endangering German security” in the German-occupied territories of western Europe were to be arrested and either shot or spirited away under cover of “night and fog” (that is, clandestinely) to concentration camps.
Night and Fog is unlike other Holocaust films I have seen. The problem with Hollywood Holocaust films is that they attempt to make the audience vicariously live through the characters experience with such a staggeringly incomprehensible experience, which then reduces such an experience to a sentimental melodrama. Instead, Night and Fog resembles the anti-documentary: how can we document such a harsh reality? Resnais did not presume to speak for the victims and survivors of the camps: he chose as his screenwriter the novelist Jean Cayrol, a man who had actually been imprisoned in one.
Resnais and Cayrol do not attempt to offer a comprehensive guide to the concentration camp universe. On the contrary, the voiceover is filled with skepticism and doubt, and a sympathetic awareness of the viewer’s resistance to grasping the unthinkable. The voiceover narration says things like “Useless to describe what went on in these cells,” and “Words are insufficient,” and “No description, no picture can reveal their true dimension.” Meanwhile, the viewer is calmly given information about the Nazis’ extermination procedures. in Night and Fog, there is a clear dichotomy between the necessity of remembering, and the impossibility of doing so.
Something that was very powerful throughout the film was the discontinuity between sounds and visual. The score of the film is a light, airy tune which completely contrasts the images of limp, dead bodies being bulldozed, thrown into pits, and dismantled. The most disturbing part of the film, for me, was the footage of materials that were made from the dead bodies, like cloth made from hair, manure made from bones, soap made from bodies, and paper made from skin. This scene is an example of Resnais’ attempt to show rather than tell.