Night and Fog (The Criterion Collection) - Classic WWII Documentary Film - Perfect for History Buffs & Film Studies

I'm sure I'll watch "Night and Fog" many times inasmuch as I purchased the DVD. However, I write my review based on my first impressions. This is a short film running just 1/2 hour. The visual aspects of the movie are what we expect to be the impressions we'll remember and, for me, that was the case. Yet the accompanying verbal essay says a lot as well. I suspect that I will gather more and more from the essay in future repeated viewings. I will eventually absorb all of the English subtitles (including the number of subtitles that obscured themselves so well into the picture that I couldn't always make them out). However, it will be the photographic essay that continues to be the compelling narrator.I previewed this film with my 13 year-old son whose class was about to study the Holocaust. "You might as well find out the truth" I told him and I expected that he would be nauseated by what was going to pass before his eyes. Yet the visual story was gradual and intermixed with (then) modern day scenes from Auschwitz. I noticed that the time was flying by and still none of the real horrors had yet been seen. Eventually, the pictures told the truth about what man can do to his fellow humans when he is left with only his hate and technology. There was no need to overdo the gruesomeness; the pictures we saw were enough. It wasn't until the movie was over that I understood the director's purpose. The Holocaust did not begin with genocide; it culminated with genocide. Michel Bouquet brings us along gradually and chronologically into the horror. We know what's coming and, dare I say this, what we see through the first two thirds of the movie was not so bad. Was this how it was to live in the lap of mass murder; things may not have seemed right but, then again, they didn't seem so wrong either. People were labelled, then confined, then imprisoned, then punished, then executed, then destroyed. If you bought into the firtst step, was it not possible to follow for a few more steps? I thought that this aspect was the greatness of "Night and Fog" and it struck me as all the more effective because Bouquet did it in just 31 minutes.