Alain Resnais

Night and Fog

Night and Fog

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek in Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), one of the first cinematic reflections on the Holocaust. Juxtaposing the stillness of the abandoned camps’ empty buildings with haunting wartime footage, Resnais investigates humanity’s capacity for violence, and presents the devastating suggestion that such horrors could occur again.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1955
  • 32 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.37:1
  • French
  • Spine #197

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Excerpt from a 1994 audio interview with director Alain Resnais
  • New interview with filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer
  • Face aux fantômes, a ninety-nine-minute 2009 documentary featuring historian Sylvie Lindeperg that explores the French memory of the Holocaust and the controversy surrounding the film’s release
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Colin MacCabe

    New cover by Sarah Habibi

Purchase Options

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Excerpt from a 1994 audio interview with director Alain Resnais
  • New interview with filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer
  • Face aux fantômes, a ninety-nine-minute 2009 documentary featuring historian Sylvie Lindeperg that explores the French memory of the Holocaust and the controversy surrounding the film’s release
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Colin MacCabe

    New cover by Sarah Habibi
Night and Fog
Credits
Director
Alain Resnais
Produced by
Anatole Dauman
Produced by
Samy Halfon
Produced by
Philippe Lifchitz
Historical consultants
Henri Michel
Historical consultants
Olga Wormser
Music
Hanns Eisler
Text
Jean Cayrol
Camera
Ghislain Cloquet
Camera
Sacha Vierny

Current

Joshua Oppenheimer on Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog
Joshua Oppenheimer on Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog

The Oscar-nominated documentarian discusses Resnais’s film—made in 1955, ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps—which was one of the first to confront the devastation of the Holocaust.

Night and Fog: The Never-Ending Cries
Night and Fog: The Never-Ending Cries

Interweaving wartime footage with haunting images of abandoned concentration camps, Alain Resnais’s breakthrough was one of the first films to confront the ravages of the Holocaust.

By Colin MacCabe

Remembering Alain Resnais
Remembering Alain Resnais
A few years ago, as I was collaborating on the Criterion release of Last Year at Marienbad, I had the chance to meet Alain Resnais. We had released Hiroshima mon amour and Night and Fog a few years earlier, and the director had not been available to…

By Alexandre Mabilon

Fifty Essential Documentary Films
Fifty Essential Documentary Films
Today, we’re celebrating the release on Blu-ray and DVD of Les Blank’s legendary Leon Russell music documentary A Poem Is a Naked Person. And while we’re on the topic of fascinating nonfiction filmmaking, we’re also taking a look at a new lis…
William Friedkin’s Top 10
William Friedkin’s Top 10

“I discovered Criterion in the late eighties with the laserdisc of
 Citizen Kane, which I still watch,” writes director William Friedkin, whose films include The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer, and 2011’s Killer Joe.

Stuart Cooper’s Top 10
Stuart Cooper’s Top 10

“I have chosen ten titles from the Criterion Collection not because they are my favorites or necessarily the most important, but because they mean a lot to me personally and bear some relationship to my filmmaking career and the making of Overlord.