Night and Fog

Night and Fog is a moving French documentary that moves through the concentration camps retelling the horrific events that happened inside their walls during World War II.   The film itself switches from "current" footage of the camps as they were when the film was being produced, to images and old reels showing the raw documented footage of the horrors that existed inside the barbed wire.  The documentary used the images to full portray the events that the narrator was recanting.  As with most narrated biographies or documentaries like this one, the main focus of the editors and producers were on the images themselves and not the sounds.  Through the use of images, the viewers brain saw the calm colored images of a compound with grass growing on the ground and vines climbing up the walls of the cold buildings. Then the screen would be cut and revert to different older footage from the time when the camp was in operation.  Through this non-linear way of cutting the footage, the viewer would continuously have the awareness of the emaciated people who were once walking or working through unbearable conditions in the same area filled with color and plant life.

There was also a mixture of stagnant and moving clips giving a further enhancement to the pictures.  Inevitably the picture enhanced and overshadowed the audio.  Despite it's excellent work with image use, the audio was slightly overlooked and was definitely of a lesser quality than the image.  The music is not composed as well as the video. For instance, when you first see the main gate entrance of the concentration camps the music is meant to portray horror. However, it comes of as just loud and off key, as if there was no real composition to the music clip.  Throughout the rest of the film, there was no key musical timing that was as memorable as the images and maintained a relatively depressed tone.  Even with lack luster audio, the film was brought up by the amazing quality of the footage taken.  Night and Fog was truly able to immortalize the horrors of the concentration camps from World War II through it's memorable images and well composed narration.