Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.
I’ve said before that there is probably no event of human experience more fully explored in film than World War II. When it comes to World War II, there is probably no event more extensively written about and filmed than the Holocaust. I have, over the course of this odyssey, seen more than my share of Holocaust-based films. None have been as brutal, as powerful, or as morally shocking as Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog). Even the overwhelming emotional assault of Shoah cannot compare with the stark atrocity depicted in this film.
Really, I’m left with very little to say about this film. Most of us have seen some of the images of the gaunt stick figures, the shattered bodies, the skulls, the crematoria, but being exposed to them in the past is no inoculation against seeing them here. These images are, of course, of critical importance for anyone to see—they record one of the darkest and most evil times in human history, an industry of human slaughter designed only to kill as efficiently as possible. Even these, though, are not the truly awful images that stay with the viewer.
