Criterion

The title elements of Alain Resnais’ 32-minute documentary Night and Fog are illusive features evoked throughout the film. If not literally seen in full—there is darkness but no fog—the associative concept of that which can conceal from view, as both night and fog can, lies at the heart of this extraordinarily powerful work. In contemporary color scenes, Resnais reveals the peaceful Polish fields, country roads, and village pathways that could potentially lead to then obscured and now forgotten Nazi concentration camps. That these horrific facilities were kept hidden in plain sight at the time of their operation and are, in 1955, discarded and dilapidated in the deep recesses of an ever-diminishing memory, echoes the thematic crux of the film. Night and Fog is fundamentally concerned with the struggle to remember, due to deliberate unwillingness, for a number of reasons, or due to a natural fading of recollection; this with the related difficulty of accurately conveying the shocking atrocities that transpired once upon a time: http://www.cutprintfilm.com/blu/blu-ray-review-night-fog/