On demand: "Night and Fog/Nuit et Brouillard"

I'm not sure it's still the case, but there was a time when French broadcasters routinely plugged Night and Fog, Alain Resnais' half-hour short of 1955, into their TV schedules in the wake of large-scale hate crimes and terror attacks. Arriving a decade after the conclusion of the Second World War, this was always intended as a reminder (and warning) that there were places scattered across Central Europe where man once rounded up his fellow man and proceeded to do the most terrible things. In its form, the short is no more and no less than an example of classical film montage, briskly clipping together archive newsreel, varyingly distressing stills and newly shot footage of the concentration camps, and adorning the results with an authoritative voiceover (brilliantly written by Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol, urgently spoken by Michel Bouquet) that lays out the cruelties of the Nazi masterplan (over a sequence illustrating camp design: "no-one need enter more than once") while confessing the limitations of the documentarist's approach ("no dimension, no angle, no shot can fully capture the fear"). There is no nonsense, no equivocation, no "well, there's been some dispute over the numbers"; the editorial line, as firm as any resistance movement needs to be, is that this is how it was, the intention to lift the obfuscations inscribed in the title and to counter the murkiness of the Nazi project with the non-fiction equivalent of disinfecting sunlight. It happened here (and here and here), Resnais states - and, if we're not careful, it could just as easily happen again.

I spent much of lockdown reading and revisiting the collected works of Clive James, and I was struck by just how forcefully the Holocaust was imprinted on the writing and thoughts of even an Australian who reached Europe relatively late in the 20th century. James, though, was of a generation that remembered, in large part because they were close enough to these atrocities - chronologically, psychically, spiritually - but also because they had texts like Resnais' film around to prompt and prod them into remembering. We, by contrast, exist in a strange, complex place and time where we are at every waking moment surrounded by all the information in the world, and are accordingly distracted to the point of forgetfulness. Seventy years later, Night and Fog still jolts, loaded as it was with imagery that cuts through our rather rote and childproofed comprehension of the camps: the gaze of a patient in a sick bay, half-desperate, half-crazed; the charred bodies left behind on pyres like firewood; a basket of severed heads. (Which is to say there are segments that go beyond documentation and into the realms of abject horror, that there are sights here you cannot forget and will take with you to your own grave.) Somewhere in the journey from there to here, Night and Fog fell out of circulation: after some thirty years of film-watching, I only stumbled across it in a far-flung corner of the Internet. The short is anti-commercial; our censor boards wouldn't know what to do with it; and there may not be a 21st century trigger warning big enough to cover the Holocaust. Yet it vividly haunts later texts made by those who did see it. Claude Lanzmann was to expand Resnais' field of study into Shoah and subsequent documentaries, striving to cover the same ground in as much nuts-and-bolts detail as he could, while Night and Fog's brief tour of a kapo's villa foresees The Zone of Interest, today's most provocative and sobering reminder of the evils of Nazism (and thus the evils of man). The usual caveat applies - how much importance you want to attach to something as trifling as mere moving pictures - but there may never have been a more important film in the entire history of cinema.

Night and Fog is now streaming via watchdocumentaries.com.