Nacht und Nebel

I just had myself a nice little nightcap, a viewing of the 32-minute, mandatory-viewing-for-children-in-France Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog). With all the concentration camps in movies, it's amazing that this archival footage seldom makes the rounds. Equally amazing is how close filmic representations can come to the real thing without ever having the asme power. There is something about real images of death and suffering that cannot be duplicated and is unmistakeable.

It sounds like an abstract, elitist, Ivy League classic film (as Stephen Colbert might put it), but really the concept is simple: juxtapose archival footage with the empty modern remains of camps, implying that "the monster" is not buried under the decrepit buildings but asleep among us and a part of humanity.

Certainly the Germans were only executing with genocidal zeal what others have done before and since. Obviously the means of attaining such numbers (and documenting the events) are the new phenomena, not the will to achieve it.

In any case, while I ruminated that indeed these events only happened sixty years ago, a seemingly arbitrary aspect of the film drove the point home. The narrator sarcastically notes that the prisoners were stripped naked under the pretense of "hygiene." Seeing them lined up naked and in line to enter the camp struck me as no different than the way prisons always process newcomers--and with the same pretenses of hygiene! At the top of the concentration camp hierarchy, in fact, were "common criminals." So, essentially, the concentration camps were enlarged prisons bloated with every conceivably offensive element of society. The political opponents, gypsies, other criminals, and other minorities finally out of the way and working for the bourgeoisie. The gradual extermination of these prisoners is simply the logical conclusion to any argument one can make in favor of the death penalty.