Night and Fog

It's unsettling to watch a movie with complete uncensored gore, but even more so when the footage is of true events. I think it's safe to say the majority of the worlds population knows something or another about the holocaust and with that said, I also think it's kind of a challenge for the filmmaker to produce the "story" of the genocide in a way that's unseen and will capture the full magnitude of the events. Night and fog depicts these events, personally for me, in a way that hasn't been told before. From past films and pictures I've encountered about the holocaust and about the concentration camps in particular, I always came away with a sympathetic outcome. You get a sense of the humanity among the people, you feel for them, and yet that's all that happens- merely feeling sorry for them and what they endured. What night and fog does, is it allows you to see actual footage from the camps when they were active, but also footage of the camps years after they closed. You see footage of living human beings in a perpetual state of fear, then all of sudden a barren field with sparse flowers is in front of you. Whether intentional or not, the editing of this film creates a foreshadowing, if you will, from physically seeing living human beings, to an empitness with zero humanity. It subconsciously prepares you for the scenes where the footage cuts back to those same people that were just breathing not 10 seconds before hand, to now, having their lifeless bodies bull dozed into a pyre- as if their physical being is no better than a pile of dirt. This is where I think the film is set apart. The non-linear editing allows to you create a sort of bond with the people, although the outcome is already known. You can sympathize with them, not showing their corpses can allow a "reassurance" that maybe they made it out- but then cut to a literal mountain of human hair, souls walking into a gas chamber and the piles upon piles of rotting corpses, you take away that sense of humanity and replace the viewers sympathy with utter horror. The magnitude of the events that took place actually become real. On another note, I think the black and white gives the film a sort of old, ominous feel. The absence of color can sort of detach the viewers reality of the scenes they're watching- add color and you get another- 'holy shit this literally happened'- moment.

http://youtu.be/j1VL-y9JHuI  - the link is to a scene from Schindlers List, if you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend. This particular scene is one where people are literally being massacred in the streets, Jews are being lined up, one in front of the other, and shot in the head to see how many can be killed at once, as a game. It's literally sickening, yet with all that going on, a little girl in red is walking through the streets and it's as if she's the only one you care about. You see her and all that comes to mind is ' PLEASE don't kill the little girl in red '. I think this is a great example of how color too, can have a monumental impact on an already grave scene.