I stared at the wall for what seemed an hour. Time meant little to me. After watching Alain Resnais' 1955 Holocaust film, "Night and Fog," I struggled to remove my mind from Auschwitz. Images of death echoed in my head. Bits of poetic narration played over and over. "Who is responsible?"
I came about this film by accident. I am an English teacher, and currently my students are reading Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize winning memoir, "Night." Looking for a visual connection to the piece, I came across "Night and Fog." At 31 minutes, it appeared the perfect video complement to that devastating book. After watching the film in my dark, empty classroom, I realized the film offered so much more.
In a culture where violence and images of death are glamorized, "Night and Fog" serves a unique purpose. It cuts through the desensitized soul and puts us face-to-face with true, unadulterated evil. While many might suggest this is overkill, occasionally we need to do this if only to remind ourselves of man's potential to perpetrate the abominations this film so cruelly unveils. We need to force ourselves to confront such forces, if only to ensure the film's prophetic final lines do not become a reality. "Who is on the lookout...to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?"
This is the question which consumed me as I stared seemingly forever at the wall after the film ended. This is the question I want my students to ask. After much deliberation, I decided to show it, not as a history lesson, but as a moral lesson in the nature of evil. Great films get a strong reaction. Resnais' film is one of the greats.
