--- title: "Night and Fog" year: 1956 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/night-and-fog" fi1m_score: 91 critics_score: 83 critics_reviews: 6 published: "2026-09-17T04:38:15.050666+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T04:38:15.638116+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Night and Fog (1956) Directed by Alain Resnais · 32m · Documentary, History **Fi1m score: 91** · Critics 83 from 6 reviews *In a sentence:* Green grass, a slow tracking shot and the worst photographs ever taken; thirty-two minutes turns out to be exactly enough > Alain Resnais’s half-hour on the camps, shot in colour at Auschwitz and cut against the archive, is as clear and as hard to watch as it was in 1956. Hanns Eisler’s music will divide people. See it once, and see it whole. ## Synopsis Ten years after the war, a camera moves slowly through the grass and rusted wire of Auschwitz in colour, while a narrator (Michel Bouquet) reads a commentary written by Jean Cayrol. Then the film cuts to black and white. Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Julius Streicher appear in newsreel and photographs as the machine is assembled: the rallies, the arrests, the trains. The camps are designed and built like any other public works, with architects and contractors, and the first deportees arrive in sealed wagons in the dark. Director Alain Resnais moves back and forth between the empty present and the crowded past for thirty-two minutes, and the commentary asks, as calmly as it can, what happened here and who allowed it. ## Review Alain Resnais made *Night and Fog* in 1956, a decade after the camps were opened, and it runs thirty-two minutes. Sacha Vierny and Ghislain Cloquet shot the present in colour at Auschwitz: a camera moving at walking pace along a fence, across a field, into a brick building with nothing in it. Between these shots Resnais, who also edited the film, cuts to what the place looked like when it was full. Jean Cayrol wrote the commentary and Michel Bouquet reads it. We would tell a stranger to see it, and we would not tell them much else first. The design is simple and it never wavers. Colour means now; black and white means then. The colour footage is quiet and almost pretty, with grass grown over the tracks and rust on the wire, and the camera keeps moving as if it were looking for something. The archive is stills and newsreel, and it does not move at all. Resnais opens the black and white with Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and Streicher, the men at the top, and then leaves them behind to show what they ordered: the arrests, the wagons, the camps going up as a construction project with plans and tenders. The cutting is the argument. Nothing is explained that a cut can show. We were horrified, and we have seen these pictures before. It is the way Resnais holds them. A room of women’s hair. A room of spectacles. Bodies pushed by a bulldozer, filmed by the soldiers who arrived. He does not zoom in, he does not linger longer than he must, and he does not cut away early either. Bouquet’s voice stays level throughout, and that levelness is what did it to us. A narrator who raised his voice would have given us somewhere to put the feeling. This one leaves it with us. Hanns Eisler’s score is the part people argue over, and we understand why. It is light, often a flute or a few strings, and it is sometimes almost pastoral over images that are anything but. On first viewing it can seem wrong. On second viewing it is plainly deliberate: the music refuses to tell you what to feel, in a film where telling you would be the easy thing. Cayrol’s commentary takes the same line. It is dry, at times ironic, and it catalogues the camp as if describing a town. Once or twice the irony is too neat, a well-turned French sentence sitting on top of something no sentence should sit on top of. Those are the moments the film comes closest to being writing rather than witness. The film also says less than a modern viewer will want about who the dead were. It speaks of deportees and of nations, and it is more interested in how the machine worked than in whom it was built to kill. That is a real limit, and later films have addressed it. It does not make this one less true about what it does show. Resnais went on to *Hiroshima mon amour* (1959), and the concerns are already here: how a place holds what happened in it, and how quickly the grass comes back. Set against Claude Lanzmann’s *Shoah* (1985), which runs for nine hours and uses no archive footage at all, this is the opposite method, and the two films need each other. Lanzmann waits for memory to speak. Resnais shows you the evidence and asks why the tourists are photographing the gate. Watch it alone, with the lights off and nothing planned afterwards. It does not need a cinema; it needs your full attention for half an hour, which is a great deal harder to give than three hours of partial attention. Thirty-two minutes, no certificate, and you will not want to put anything else on when it is over. *Fi1m score 91, published 17 September 2026.* ## What the critics say The reviews are unanimous in their approval. Most critics fix on the same device: Resnais cuts between colour footage of the empty camps as they stood after the war and black-and-white archive material of what happened there, and nearly every review calls that contrast the source of the film’s power. Cayrol’s narration and Eisler’s score are also singled out, the commentary for mixing anger with cool irony and the music for its restraint. The disagreement is a matter of degree rather than direction. The warmest reviews, at Slant Magazine and Film Comment, treat it as the definitive short film on the subject and admire how it questions whether cinema can show such things at all. The New Yorker is the coolest, still respectful but more interested in the film’s argument about memory than in its assembly. Nobody raises a serious reservation; the spread runs from admiring to reverent. ### Reviews we read (6) - **Film Comment** (90/100, inferred): The critic praises the film's authoritative assembly and its ability to convey the meaning of the extermination camps while highlighting Resnais's splendid filmmaking. It singles out the tension between poetic and prosaic elements, the use of color to contrast present and past, and the sensual yet troubling approach to the subject matter. [Read](https://www.filmcomment.com/article/alain-resnais/) - **Slant Magazine**, Clayton Dillard (90/100, inferred): The critic calls it the most concise and evocative film about human-made catastrophe, praising its structure that contrasts serene postwar color footage with horrific archival images, its avoidance of easy theses, and its challenge to cinematic representation of tragedy through Eisler's music and rhetorical narration. [Read](https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/night-and-fog/) - **Empire**, David Parkinson (85/100, inferred): The critic calls it a devastating brief analysis of the Holocaust that identifies who perished in the camps and who was responsible. They highlight its chilling immediacy from juxtaposing colour footage of empty camps with monochrome stills and newsreels, plus its power as a moving memoir that encouraged further exploration of the Shoah. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/night-fog-review/) - **The Times**, Ed Potton (85/100, inferred): The critic describes Resnais’s short film as a lyrical commentary that interleaves archival black-and-white footage with postwar color images of Auschwitz, encapsulating the horror of the camps with startling power. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/night-and-fog-15-txr853ltf5t) - **Time Out**, BBa (80/100, inferred): Resnais finds a tone suited to the enormity of the Nazi death camps. Cayrol's commentary mixes indignation, bewilderment and cool irony, while Eisler's music provides austerity tempered by tenderness. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/nuit-et-brouillard) - **The New Yorker**, Richard Brody (70/100, inferred): The critic praises the film's half-hour length for transforming modern consciousness by blending archival footage of Nazi atrocities with contemporary color images of camp ruins. It singles out Resnais's method of combining historical inquiry with questions of memory and why such events must be remembered. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/night-and-fog) ## Details - **Director:** Alain Resnais - **Director:** Alain Resnais - **Screenplay:** Jean Cayrol - **Cinematography:** Ghislain Cloquet, Sacha Vierny - **Editor:** Alain Resnais - **Music:** Hanns Eisler - **Producer:** Philippe Lifchitz, Anatole Dauman, Samy Halfon - **Cast:** Michel Bouquet as Narrator (voice) (uncredited); Reinhard Heydrich as Self (archive footage) (uncredited); Heinrich Himmler as Self (archive footage) (uncredited); Adolf Hitler as Self (archive footage) (uncredited); Julius Streicher as Self (archive footage) (uncredited) - **Runtime:** 32m - **First release (France):** 29 January 1956 - **Genres:** Documentary, History ## Where to watch in the US - HBO Max: streaming - The Roku Channel: add-on, hd - Hulu: add-on, hd - Amazon Prime Video: add-on - Amazon Prime Video: rent $2.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $9.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-17.* Also available in: AE, AR, AT, BE, BG, BR, CA, CL, CO, DE, ES, FR, GR, HK, HR, HU, ID, IL, IN, JP, KR, MX, MY, NL, PA, PH, PL, RO, RS, SG, TH, TR, UA, US, VN, ZA. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *Shoah* (1985), Fi1m 93: Lanzmann’s nine hours of testimony, the opposite method and the necessary companion — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/shoah.md) - *Hiroshima mon amour* (1959): Resnais’s next film, about a city and a woman that remember differently - *The Sorrow and the Pity* (1969): Ophuls asks a French town what it did in the war and waits for answers - *The Act of Killing* (2012), Fi1m 88: Indonesian death-squad men restage their crimes; the camera stays as calm as Resnais’s — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-act-of-killing.md) - *Son of Saul* (2015), Fi1m 87: Auschwitz from inside, in shallow focus, refusing to show what Resnais shows — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/son-of-saul.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/night-and-fog