Nuit et Brouillard = Night and Fog

“‘Nuit et Brouillard’ establishes the classic photographic dichotomy of the Holocaust film, according to which the past is seen in black and white and the present in colour. The aesthetic quality of the film stems from the inter-relation of Cayrol’s text and Eisler’s music with Resnais’s editing, which juxtaposes colour images of the ruins of the death camps with black and white archive footage of the camps and their victims during the war. Resnais thus excavates the horrors lying beneath the deceptively banal landscapes of the present day, landscapes which like those of Lanzman’s ‘Shoah’ are at times startingly beautiful with blue or pink skies and orange trees. It has even been remarked that these colours were too bright, like open wound or ‘draining blood’. The disembodied and anonymous narration in ‘Nuit et Brouillard’, the film’s universal concerns, and the absence of any reference to the extermination of the Jews might be taken as conforming to the myth of ‘resistancialisme’. Although a specifically French context is given by brief allusions to the camps at Pithiviers and Compiegne, and to the deportation of Jews from the Velodrome d’Hiver in Paris, the image which most explicitly challenge the Gaullist myth - a French policeman surveying the camps at Pithiviers - was censored.” Reference: Guy Austin. ‘Contemporary French Cinema’. Manchester University Press, 1996.

Credits: Producer, Anatole Dauman ; director, Alain Resnais ; photography, Sacha Vierny, Ghislain Cloquet ; music, Hans Eisler ; editor, Henri Colpi.