Night and Fog (dir: Alain Resnais, writ: Jean Cayrol)

I'm not going to talk about it much. Its the hardest documentary I've ever sat through in my life. 30 minutes and twice I thought about turning it off. I wish I had, the last 6 or so minutes spared no detail of atrocity. Hair piled high, beheaded bodies for soap, the crematoriums, everything that the documentor walked through only ten years after it's use. Looking for fingernail scratchings in the gas chambers.

I was vaguely aware that this would be the reflections of a survivor ten years after the writer's experiences in Auschwitz and Majdanek. But I was not prepared for the parallel architectural study and archical footage of such torture and death.

One is about ethnic cleansing, and Resnais pleads to us at the close to keep our eyes open for, genodie did not end in that time and place. But the other is about what made the Holocaust not just a genocide. Sad to admit it, but the technical planning, the business, the technology, the cold calculation. The two together has always been a discussion, but looking at it, like this, is an onslaught to the senses. I don't think anyone who sees this will sleep for weaks, and I admit I almost became ill when he lingered on the shaved female hair.

Night and Fog (dir: Alain Resnais, writ: Jean Cayrol)

I'm not going to talk about it much. Its the hardest documentary I've ever sat through in my life. 30 minutes and twice I thought about turning it off. I wish I had, the last 6 or so minutes spared no detail of atrocity. Hair piled high, beheaded bodies for soap, the crematoriums, everything that the documentor walked through only ten years after it's use. Looking for fingernail scratchings in the gas chambers.

I was vaguely aware that this would be the reflections of a survivor ten years after the writer's experiences in Auschwitz and Majdanek. But I was not prepared for the parallel architectural study and archical footage of such torture and death.

One is about ethnic cleansing, and Resnais pleads to us at the close to keep our eyes open for, genodie did not end in that time and place. But the other is about what made the Holocaust not just a genocide. Sad to admit it, but the technical planning, the business, the technology, the cold calculation. The two together has always been a discussion, but looking at it, like this, is an onslaught to the senses. I don't think anyone who sees this will sleep for weaks, and I admit I almost became ill when he lingered on the shaved female hair.

Hm, I have never seen that one, but I did see a very straight-forward documentary featuring reels from the US government of just liberated camps. I didn't see the whole thing because it was about to get on a segment on children, which is too much even for me.