2/12/2013

"Night and Fog" Review

For Matured Audiences

Credits to the uploader :kh4nbahadur


Night and Fog documents the tragedy from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor, it pulls you straight into the mood with its poetic narration, its curiosity arousing opening shot of an abandoned concentration camp and its depressing score.

The infamous Holocaust was known to almost everyone through obscured history teachings and heroic war films that didn't leave me with the impact "Night and Fog" did. We are constantly reminded in films and books that 6 million Jews were massacred and other atrocities the Nazis committed but what impact did it really had? To me, little to non, maybe with just a passing thought "Hitler is a real psycho".

After watching Night and Fog, then I did finally realized the cruelty that had happened, blockbuster films doesn't show you that, history books couldn't paint the picture. The raw stock images and footages used were gruesome, Stretched to my 16:9 monitor, I was stared by a real corpse, witness bodies being bulldozed.... They didn't made me scared but empty, it was weird, indescribable.

We people living in this age are enjoying and entertained by WW2 exploits, Nazis and Hitler being destroyed over and over again in countless films, and us enjoying it, yes "justice" must be served and of cause we are also entertained to have them back as always to be our central villainous figure. This is awfully similar to how the Nazis influence their citizens into acknowledging the Nazi's cause, I'm not saying that modern films of WW2 exploits are all propaganda because most of them are to milk money, yet they delivers the same kind of messages:
" Our cause is honorable ", " We serve justice " " We are good and they evil ".....
People may argue that the fact is they really are on the good side and films are portraying the fact but that's not the point, the point is what humans are capable of when exposed to all these ideologies, quote from the last stanza of Night and Fog
"Are their faces really different from our own?".
I couldn't cry nor am i enraged when this documentary completes its final stanza, just empty.

PS: You will be imprinted with lots of gruesome images after watching it, the eyes wide female corpse is still vivid in my memory.