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Night and Fog - Criterion CollectionRating:
Release Date: 24 June, 2003 Retail Price: $14.95 OUR Price: $10.99 You SAVE: $3.96! Cast: |
Night and Fog - Criterion Collection Reviews
Grtadual Descent into Hell
I'm sure I'll watch "Night and Fog" many times inasmuch as I purchased the DVD. However, I write my review based on my first impressions. This is a short film running just 1/2 hour. The visual aspects of the movie are what we expect to be the impressions we'll remember and, for me, that was the case. Yet the accompanying verbal essay says a lot as well. I suspect that I will gather more and more from the essay in future repeated viewings. I will eventually absorb all of the English subtitles (including the number of subtitles that obscured themselves so well into the picture that I couldn't always make them out). However, it will be the photographic essay that continues to be the compelling narrator.
I previewed this film with my 13 year-old son whose class was about to study the Holocaust. "You might as well find out the truth" I told him and I expected that he would be nauseated by what was going to pass before his eyes. Yet the visual story was gradual and intermixed with (then) modern day scenes from Auschwitz. I noticed that the time was flying by and still none of the real horrors had yet been seen. Eventually, the pictures told the truth about what man can do to his fellow humans when he is left with only his hate and technology. There was no need to overdo the gruesomeness; the pictures we saw were enough. It wasn't until the movie was over that I understood the director's purpose. The Holocaust did not begin with genocide; it culminated with genocide. Michel Bouquet brings us along gradually and chronologically into the horror. We know what's coming and, dare I say this, what we see through the first two thirds of the movie was not so bad. Was this how it was to live in the lap of mass murder; things may not have seemed right but, then again, they didn't seem so wrong either. People were labelled, then confined, then imprisoned, then punished, then executed, then destroyed. If you bought into the firtst step, was it not possible to follow for a few more steps? I thought that this aspect was the greatness of "Night and Fog" and it struck me as all the more effective because Bouquet did it in just 31 minutes.
Best Depiction of Holocaust Horrors
I saw this film over 25 years ago and there is nothing that I've seen since that has made such an impression on me in regards to the shameful atrocities of the Nazi's in WWII. It is probably because of this film that I get so upset when I hear reports that someone states that the holocaust never happened.
Out of all the reviews here, only one has given this anything less than four stars. To that person I say, yes, this is disgusting and disturbing - it was meant to be because it covers a most disgusting and disturbing historical truth. I also agree that it is not for children. Nor is it elegant. To describe this subject in an elegant way seems to me like a crime unto itself.
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