70 Years after Auschwitz: Revisiting Night and Fog (Alain Resnais)

This communications aims to analyze the seminal documentary film of Alain Resnais, Nuit et Bruillard, about the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in Poland.

Night and Fog was held in 1955, with 32 minutes long, in the concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz, Poland, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the camp liberation at the end of World War II. The film features an innovative narrative, articulating film material made in the camp with archive images of the same camp shot during its operation during the war. The images are accompanied by a poetic text by French writer Jean Cayrol, who was a member of the French Resistance deported to the Mauthausen camp in 1943, which refers to torture, humiliation, terror and extermination, on a daily basis, related to the “rational technique" of the killing machine created by the Nazis during that period.

The main concern is to analyze the relationships established by the film in its constructive aspects highlighting the ways they are used in order to establish the relationship between cinema and society, by a close look to a documentary of one of the most tragic moments in the history of the twentieth century, through a detailed analysis of its narrative, its composition, its options to allude meanings, its silences.