A slow, almost spectral tracking shot glides across a meadow of unnatural, saturated green, under a pacific blue sky. Grass grows where the barracks once stood; flowers bloom where blood once soaked the earth. This is Alain Resnais’s first, brutal aesthetic statement in "Night and Fog": the present, in 1955, is not a healing, but an obscene, colourful mask placed over the monochrome, emaciated face of the past. The film is not a documentary about the Shoah; it is a cinematic essay on memory, on its fallibility, and on the terrifying capacity of the landscape to absorb horror and return it to us as placid normality.

Resnais, who would later explore the mental architectures of recollection in masterpieces like Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, here lays the foundation for his entire poetics. He does so through a formal dialectic as simple as it is devastating: colour versus black and white. Colour is the present, a today that would rather forget, a tourism of memory that wanders in disbelief among the ruins. Black and white is the archive, the eruption of the repressed, the irrefutable evidence of a reality that defies representation. But Resnais's genius does not lie in simple alternation. It lies in the way the two visual regimes infect one another. Ghislain Cloquet and Sacha Vierny’s colour photography is never comforting; it is sick, too vivid, like a feverish hallucination. The horizontal tracking shots across rusted rails or along barbed wire transform the camp’s remains into a cruel, abstract art installation. The present cannot contain the past; it is haunted by it, and its very beauty becomes an indictment.

The text, written by the poet and survivor Jean Cayrol, is the work’s other pillar. It is not a didactic narration but a philosophical lament, a litany that refuses to point to a specific culprit, taking refuge instead in a more frightening analysis: that of the bureaucracy of evil. The calm voice of Michel Bouquet (in the original version) lists the horrors not with the fire of a demagogue, but with the chilling precision of a medical report. We hear of "a precise architecture," of "a rational economy," of "meticulous accounting." The concentration camp is not the fruit of a demonic madness, but the final, logical product of a system, of an efficient organization, of modernity taken to its extreme conclusions. It is an insight that anticipates Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" by years. The executioners are not alien monsters, but "men like us." This phrase, repeated like a mantra, demolishes any comfortable distance between the spectator and the horror, forcing us to interrogate not the otherness of evil, but its potential, terrifying proximity.

The musical score by Hanns Eisler, a student of Schoenberg and collaborator of Brecht, operates in cruel counterpoint. It avoids all sentimentality, any easy emotional commentary. It is a modernist, dissonant music that, instead of underscoring the horror of the images, often freezes it, creating a Brechtian alienation effect. It prevents us from weeping, forcing us to think. When the camera explores the empty dormitories, the music is not funereal but almost lyrical, evoking a lost normality that makes the absence all the more deafening. It’s the same technique Kubrick would use decades later, making his spaceships dance to a Strauss waltz: the juxtaposition of image and sound generates a third, more profound and disturbing meaning.

"Night and Fog" is a work in constant dialogue with what would come after. It is impossible not to see it as the dialectical counterpart to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Whereas Lanzmann, thirty years later, would categorically refuse the use of archival images—deeming them insufficient and almost pornographic—and focus solely on oral testimony in the present, Resnais immerses himself in the archive to the point of suffocation. But he does so with a staggering meta-textual awareness. Cayrol's narration constantly questions the ability of those very images to communicate the truth. "No image," the voice-over says, "can ever convey the true dimension of that fear." The film, therefore, is also a desperate reflection on the limits of cinema, on its impotence before the unrepresentable. It shows the horror and, in the same instant, declares its ultimate incomprehensibility.

In this, Resnais’s approach recalls that of the writer W.G. Sebald, particularly in Austerlitz. Sebald, too, through his literary wanderings across a ghost-laden Europe, explores how the contemporary landscape is a palimpsest on which the indelible traces of catastrophe are still legible, for those who know how to look. Train stations, sanatoriums, fortresses become, like Resnais’s camps, "geographies of evil," places whose apparent normality is the greatest lie. "Night and Fog" does not document a historical event confined to the past; it maps the topography of a trauma that continues to inform the present.

The very genesis of the film is an anecdote that reveals its radical nature. Commissioned by the Comité d'histoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale for the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, it could have been a commemorative, official, reassuring work. In Resnais’s hands, it becomes the opposite. His intellectual honesty was such that it clashed with French censors, who demanded he mask, in one frame, the képi of a French gendarme guarding the Pithiviers internment camp. A detail, a single frame, that revealed the uncomfortable truth of collaboration, a national repression that post-war France was not yet ready to confront. This small conflict tells us everything: the film was not interested in creating a comfortable tale of heroes and villains, but in pointing a finger at the structures—political, social, human—that make abomination possible, anywhere and at any time.

The famous, terrible sequence on the products derived from the victims' bodies—the skin for lampshades, the hair for textiles, the bones for fertilizer—is not pure sensationalism. It is the final demonstration of the film’s thesis: total dehumanization is achieved through the transformation of the human being into raw material, into an economic resource to be exploited down to its last residue. It is the horror not of explosive violence, but of capitalist and industrial logic applied to extermination. It is an insight that pushes far beyond its specific context, becoming a universal warning about the reification of the individual.

When the final images return to colour, to the unreal peace of the camps in 1955, Cayrol’s voice poses the question that elevates the film from a masterpiece to a sacred text of civic cinema: "Then who is it that is watching from this strange observatory to warn us of the new executioners’ arrival? Do they really have a different face from our own?" "Night and Fog" closes not with an answer, but with an inquiry that pierces the screen and lodges itself in the viewer's conscience. It is not a film about "then," but about "now." It is not a funeral monument, but a mirror. A mirror that shows us a green meadow and asks if we are truly sure of what lies beneath our feet. It is a cinematic antidote to oblivion, a vaccine inoculated directly into the retina, one whose efficacy, unfortunately, seems to require constant boosters.