Nuit et Brouillard

There is not a single day which you do not see hundreds of people dead in news all around the world. There are those that kill each other because of personal conflicts, those killed because of ideologies, those that represent hatred, immense ambition for power and the lowest level of human kind. The images of Bosnia, Urumqi, an explosion in Spain, a man jumping down the World Trade Center after the plane attacks, and so many more are striking images of violence of today, and yet, while we feel sorry for these events and express condemnation personally and formally through governments, we also, unfortunately show the reality of mankind's worst behavioural characteristics: we get used it all.

When Alain Resnais asked in the end of Nuit et Brouillard, whether the concentration camps and the mass killings of Jews by Nazis during World War II would be the last one ever seen or they would be forgotten and revived in another form of violence some day in the future, I believe that he meant the similar chain of events of today. He may have done the documentary in order not to allow those events to be forgotten, and yet, he used so disgusting and unfortunately so real images that the world thinks now that they have seen the worst once, and thus, people beaten to death on the streets are even milder to the eyes of inexplicable and incomprehensible logic. The reality of today's violence unfortunately shows that one need to have a higher understanding and intelligence to see that all are the same - today and back then.


Nuit et Brouillard is a short documentary by Alain Resnais made in 1955 - ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. To this day, it remains as one of the most important documentaries of all times, and is among top 10 most disturbing films ever according to many critics and viewers. The disturbance of the movie roots not only from the graphic details of the images, but also from the fact that these had been real footage taken by Nazis themselves and allies right after the liberation. Resnais used those images mixed with the shots of those camps in 1955 in a sunny day, showing the contradiction of brutal actions happened there 10 years earlier in night and fog (nuit et brouillard) and the complete serenity and peaceful and yet abandoned view of the camps 10 years later.

The 30 minutes film is divided in three parts; first, by the views of the camps', the narrator Michel Bouquet describes the Nazi ideology. In the second part, the life of the Schutzstaffel is compared to the starvation of the prisoners in the camps, the sadistic events including torture, scientific experiments, executions and the whorehouses are discussed, and in completely black and white images, the gas chambers and piles of bodies are shown. The final part depicts the liberation of the country and the camps, the discovery of the reality and the questioning of who was responsible for those.

The film had a very high acclaim in France in its initial release, although it had faced two difficulties prior to its release; the French censors were unhappy with a shot of a French police officer in the film and the German embassy in France attempted to halt the film's release at the Cannes Film Festival. A local association of prisoners insisted the film to be shown at Cannes, threatening to occupy the screening room in their camp uniforms unless the festival showed the film (information taken from wikipedia). That year, the film was announced to be shown out of competition at Cannes, and was shown in commercial movie theatres in Paris. It was awarded the Jean Vigo Prize in 1956 and the French film critic and director François Truffaut described the movie as the greatest film ever made.

I was looking for a piece of the movie through video websites to put in here as I usually do, however I found the whole movie and decided that those wondering about it should find it and view themselves; I urge everyone to see the film, however I, personally, can not dare to see it a second time because of the disturbing images and include them in this text. See it, and do not, ever, dare to forget it, remember that every single person is responsible for these events, being brutally against, in any case, means responsibility.