5. Night And Fog (1955)
One of the first films to tackle the Holocaust as subject matter, director Alain Resnais refused to do the film until the producers brought in Jean Cayrol to write the script. Cayrol himself had been in a concentration camp and therefore intimately knew his subject matter. Night and Fog alternates between modern day footage and footage taken in concentration camps by the Nazis. The film begins with narrator Michel Bouquet describing Nazi ideology against the backdrop of Auschwitz. The lives of the camp staff and commanders is contrasted with that of the camp prisoner. Bouquet goes on to describe the sadism of the camp staff - the experiments and cruelty they expressed towards the inmates and how hard they made their lives. We are then shown piles of dead bodies and the chambers in which they were gassed. Finally, the issue of culpability is addressed. I bought Night and Fog fairly recently, and I can verify it is one heck of a harrowing film. Unlike Schindler's List, this is real horror. It may be in grainy black and white but it packs an enormous emotional punch to the gut as you see starved to death, skeletal bodies dumped unceremoniously into a giant pile of similar corpses. Night and Fog is pure hell as it takes you inside the death camps - bulldozers ploughing into mountains of dead bodies, famished desperate inmates, corpses that have been beheaded, inmates lining up to enter the gas chambers. The fact that all of the above really happened and was caught on tape is worse than any horror film you could imagine. When you watch the film, you are watching genocide on a massive systematic level coldly executed by the Nazis. The film does not last very long which is merciful. It is an enormously important historical document that has been critically reappraised as being one of the best films about the Holocaust. When it was first released, Night and Fog ran into censorship difficulties in its native France as it showed French officers guarding the Prisoners. The German embassy in France went apoplectic when they saw the film and told the French to take it out of Cannes. A lot of French intellectuals wrote articles against the film's censorship. It is regularly screened in French schools to educate pupils about the Holocaust. I firmly believe that despite its harrowing nature, Night and Fog should be shown in British schools. It is the Holocaust in a nutshell and we must never forget.