Night And Fog Documentary Techniques

Night and Fog presents the events that took place within concentration camps during World War II from a perspective that is thought-provoking and frightening. This documentary was filmed ten years after the harrowing genocide of the Second World War. During the time of the war, concentration camps were built around Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium to systematically contain and kill many different races, nationalities, sexualities, and enemies of Adolf Hitler’s Reich. Produced ten years after the liberation of these concentration camps in 1955, Night and Fog (French: Nuit et brouillard) is a short documentary film directed by French film director Alain Resnais and written in collaboration with concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol that exposes the horrors of various concentration camps in a brutally honest way. The director
The narrator only briefly mentions any nationalities of the people who were subjected to this torture. Also, in the scenes around minute eight of the film when the shaven heads, tattoos, and clothing of the inmates are being described, an effort is made to not display the faces or identities of the individuals if possible. This allows the viewer to use their imagination a little and possibly even imagine themselves as the prisoners. These three techniques keep viewers from thinking that this is simply one isolated instance that can only occur to one group of people, and makes them aware of the fact that it could happen to any country if the people of that country do not pay attention to the signs of warning. Night and Fog presents the occurrence of German concentration camps and strategically universalizes the events of the Holocaust to place a responsibility on the viewer to always be alert and aware of how these events occurred so viewers can prevent them from taking place