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Night and Fog
(1955)
Dir: Alain Resnais
I’d like to credit both this movie, and temporary oral discomfort, with making me feel like an appalling flake of human refuse. A most wrenching but absolutely necessary look at the horrors of the holocaust, at a searing thirty minutes, this is one of the most effective documentaries ever made. It intersperses serene, contemporary shots of various concentration camps, as they now stand, with reel footage and photographs of the atrocities once housed within their walls. The narration is frank and biting, and the music is appropriately tense. Even though I am one-half German, a movie like this wouldn’t ordinarily make me feel particularly rotten about myself, or my heritage. What happened was, less than ten minutes in, I was sideswiped by the most acute oral pain I have ever experienced. It felt like red ants were sodomizing one another at the gum line of my lower jaw. I’d sort of been waiting for this to happen. I knowingly brush too hard, and I usually floss only three times a week. I also drink upwards of seven cups of café battery acid a day. Plus, I have weak fucking teeth. So it was to be expected. I watched this movie at about 11:30PM. Normally, had I been watching television at that hour, I would have been settling into an episode of Blind Date. Submitting to this relatively trifling amount pain would’ve hardly seemed so narcissistic and insensitive had I been watching two L.A. fucktards squirming through an awkward dinner. But I was bearing witness to phosphorous burns inflicted on the bony feet of already-suffering prisoners, by ruthless maniacs. Little children being stuffed into crowded boxcars. Starving men made to stand naked in freezing weather, their distended bellies poking out into the frigid air. Families torn apart, never to see one another again. Infirmary patients so starved that they actually ate the dressings on their wounds, before dying in such raw agony, that their eyes were frozen, wide-open. Concentration camp toilets; orderly holes lined up side-by-side, two-deep, stretching towards perpetuity. Mountains of dead bodies being bulldozed into ditches. Putrid Hitler and his hideous little moustache. All of the personifications of wretched humanity set to music. Absorbed by an insignificant, well-fed, little twat, holding a rum-soaked q-tip against his receding gums, whimpering for relief in the cozy innards of an American two-flat. Oh, the humanity. It’s hard for me to truly internalize the horrors of WWII. I’d imagine it’s difficult for just about everyone my age. I feel like this documentary helped bring me closer than I’ve been so far, but I’ll never really understand. We live in a time, and in a country, where some three-thousand people perish when two gong-crashing wake-up calls slam into the pillars of Western commerce, and three-years later we’re still more concerned with Donnie Darko pulling his wang out of Mary Jane Watson for good, than we are with banding together and mending the world’s gangrenous, seeping wounds. I’m not even sure we deserve a movie like Night and Fog.
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