Alain Resnais' Nuit et Brouillard (1955) was ot the first film to be made about the horrors of what the French writer David Rousset would call l'univers concentrationnaire (for details of France's only concentration camp click here) but it was one of the first in France and perhaps the first to make a major impact on a worldwide audience.It was first shown at the Cannes film festival in May 1956 where is made an enormous impact on its audience although it was later withdrawn for "diplomatic reasons" (Colombat: 1993 p.27).

In 1955 Alain Resnais was specially commisioned by the Comité d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale to make a film about Nazi barbarity. Aware of his own lack of first-hand experience of the camps, he approached the writer Jean Cayrol, who was a concentration camp survivor, with a view to a possible collaboration. Ilan Avisar makes the point that a dominant characteristic of the film is the presence of the filmaker as spectator and the writer as witness to past atrocities:
 

E the viewer becomes aware of the simultneous presence and the double perspective of the former inmate and the visitor, the actual witness and the curious spectator, the encumbered survivor and the meditative artist. (Avisar: 1988 p.7)

The title Nuit et Brouillard is derived from the infamous «Nacht und Nebel Erlass» (the 'Night and Fog Decree') issued after the War began. The idea for it came from the success the Reich had in seizing thousands of labourers from the newly occupied territories and shipping them to labour camps in order to meet the sudden and enormous labour requirements which Germany faced once the war was begun. In the case of the 'Night and Fog Decree', however, the object was to secure supplies of labour but to terrorize the populations of the occupied Europe by arresting, (under the cover of night and fog as it were, all perceived ennemies of Nazi Germany. The disappearance into the night and fog of prison and concentration camps would help instill a climate of fear throughout German-occupied Europe that would militate gainst potential acts of resistance.

In Alain Resnais' Nuit et Brouillard, the title also functions metaphorically: the film in a journey back into Europe's dark past, back into les années noires that the Europe and the French had only just begun to forget. It is a film that seeks to pierce the mists or fog of time, forgetfulness and obfuscation to reveal the horror that took place in Europe.

Although the war was only ten years away and the reconstruction of a Europe devastated by war still ongoing, a full awareness of the atrocities committed within the concentration camp system had still not yet been realized. Europe had been busy reconstructing its ravaged economies, and the degradations of the univers concentrationnaire in a Europe that was becoming more prosperous and confident were scarcely imaginable.

The gulf between the serenity and peace of the present and the violence of the past opening of the film contrasts the peace and tranquility of the present with past horrors. The opening shots are of fields in the countryside of Poland. They present a idylic, pastoral scene from which it is impossible to imagine the atrocities of the past. The next shot is of the present-day Auschwitz, with the camera moving at walking pace through the camp. Jean Cayrol's commentary evokes the dead: dried blood, silent tongues.

There is then a shift in music and colour (from colour to black and white) as the transition is made from the present to past. Archive newsreel and footage from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Wills is used to evoke the development of Hitler's abuse of power. The carefully orchestrated movements of healthy Germans in Riefenstahl's film is justaposed with shots of workers building the concentrations camps. A link between Nazism's idealization of the Aryan and the mass killings of those who fell short of their standrads of humanity is established. The film's commentary details the painstaking discussions and specifications of the camps. There is a shot of a view of the finished camp. The commentary informs the viewer that the only thing missing are the detainees.

The next section if the film concentrates on the processes involved in arresting and deporting the camps' occupants. Newsreel footage of scenes across Europe are edited together. Most are Jews and mothers and their children feature prominently. Their conflusion and terror is justaposed with the calm, methodical approach of the Nazi soldiers. Some appear to enjoy the spectacle of humiliation that is being paraded before them.

The next scene is of a train speeding through the night. The voice-over evokes the conditions in a a few nouns: night, thirst, suffocation, madness. The theme of night and fog is explicit in the next scene in which the train arrives at a station at night. German soldiers wait in the dark and the fog at the side of the railway tracks for the cargo of `undesirables' to disembark. The watchtower and the sign above the gate - Arbeit Macht Frei (work makes free) - indicate that we are entering new and disturbing territory. The commentary underlines this: "It is another planet". There are shots of detainees undergoing their brutal induction to the life of this other planet: heads are shaved, numbered, and tatooed in a process designed to denude them of their humanity and individuality. The brutality of the concentration camp system is evoked in a few scenes: freezing in bed, trudging through snow-filled fields or under the glare of the sun or working in subterranean factories. The commentary underlines the suffering, presenting details of the high death tolls such harse conditions helped produce. and  and a:

Food is an ever-present obsession. shortages, theft but also solidarity. Chronic diahorria is rife due to insufficient rations and watery soup.

inhuman world - a world turned upside down

medical experimentation (castration, burning, testing of poisonous gasses)

a world divided between the powerful and the powerless - the Nazis enjoy the priviledges of their power - food, warmth, comfortable homes and, of course, the camp brothel where the younger and more attractive women are held.

scene showing the mass extermination process evoked via twelve still images
Himmler's visit to Auschwitz
death in over-crowded trains
mass murders by Einzagruppen
 

use of colour - in scenes depicting the present

use of still photography and moving archive footage
 

short, pithy voice-over commentary

evokes rather than details

the Jewish question never really addressed.
the word juif is never used in the film

general portaryal of Nazi barbarity not a study of the victimization of the Jews.

fudges the issue of French complicity
 - scene of a French gendarme guarding Pithiviers camp were censored to prevent recognition that he was, indeed, French.

I. Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable (Indianapolis & Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)

A. P. Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film (Metuchen, N.J. & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1993)

L.A. Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996)

A. Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

H. Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 à nos jours (2nd ed. Paris: Seuil, 1990)