An early work by Resnais. It’s only a half hour long, but I’ve not seen a film of any length that matches it in emotional resonance. It transcends the documentary form. I saw it around the time I first saw The Night of the Hunter, in the late fifties, and I was about to film my first documentary. Night and Fog begins with a beautiful color landscape beneath a blue sky. The camera cranes down to reveal a long stretch of barbed wire, followed by shots of vast fields overgrown with tall grass, trees, and wildflowers. The camera tracks slowly across the placid landscape, dotted with abandoned red brick buildings that could have been warehouses or barns; then a sudden shock cut to black-and-white footage of victims of the Holocaust. The long, tracking color shots of the killing fields of Auschwitz and Majdanek, only ten years after the end of the Second World War, are intercut with horrific black-and-white shots of piles of dead bodies, rooms filled with women’s hair, and personal effects. A dry, dispassionate narration is heard throughout, written by Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the camps. Night and Fog is one of Resnais’ first “memory” films and points the way to his later masterpieces, Hiroshima mon amour and . . .