Today in class we will be watching Night and Fog (1956), a film about Nazi concentration camps. Please bring in the following questions to class.
Study Questions:
1. Despite its murderous intentions, how is the camp like an ordinary bureaucracy? How does this relate to the question of responsibility?
2. The narrator asks, "Who does know anything? The reality of these camps, despised by those who built them and unfathomable to those who endured them. What hope to we have of capturing the reality?" Much of this film can be said to be an inventory of the camp--the buildings, the physical artifacts left behind. We see them with our own eyes. And yet, why does the narrator believe that there might be something about the camp that resists understanding?
3. Describe the music that plays throughout the film. How would you characterize it? What changes in it do you observe?
4. What are we to make of the presentation of bodies at the end of the film?
