Documentary Movie Reviews
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Nuit et brouillard (1956)
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Made approximately ten years after the Holocaust, Nuit et brouillard, French for Night and Fog, is one of
the earliest documentaries about what happened which shows the process at various concentration camps with footage of
Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek.
It's only thirty-two minutes long but packs a lot of power as Schindler's List. The
death photos are unparalleled, underscoring the stupidity of the whole thing. Hence, I don't get these Holocaust deniers;
massive amount of evidence is there for the taking to prove the genocide did happen. People can't make this stuff up and
expect it to stick worldwide.
Getting Jean Cayrol, who survived the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, to narrate Nuit et brouillard is of the
utmost importance because the accounts have to be seen through somebody who knew the horrors intimately. He sometimes provides
dry wit to break up the depression of the running footage. By the way, the film title is taken from his published poems.
A major controversy emerged after the filmmakers submitted the documentary at the Cannes Film Festival. It's because a French
gendarme, who can be identified by his kepi, is shown to have participated in the Holocaust. Originally, the image was censored
by a long black structural beam over the kepi which is now restored. Seeing that, the censors, with the help of the German
embassy in France, refused the screening of Nuit et brouillard. It was eventually shown outside of the competition.
The truth is the French, out of their own volition, persecuted and deported hundreds of thousands of Jews from the country from
1940 to 1944. It was done under the tutelage of Marshal Philippe Pétain who ran the Nazis' puppet Vichy government
when it, in fact, represented the French State the whole time. All post-WWII French governments until 1995 wouldn't admit to the
truth of what happened. More than 340,000 Jews lived in France, and approximately 72,500 of the deported 75,000 were
killed in death camps.
All in all, Nuit et brouillard is a must-see documentary for the sake of history, and along with the
Dreyfus Affair, France looks bad as a result.