Night and Fog
Blood of the Beasts
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Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard)
Directed by Alain Resnais.
France, 1955, 35mm, black & white, 31 min.
French with English subtitles.
The horror of the Nazi death camps placed a chilling prohibition on imagery in postwar Europe. Resnais’s stirring documentary essay, produced a decade after the end of the war, definitively shattered that taboo with images of incomparable power, culled from the archives and from his own visit to the abandoned sites. The lyrical commentary of Jean Cayrol, a concentration-camp survivor, is at once understated and blisteringly cautionary as it invokes “the cry that never ends.”
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Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des bêtes)
Directed by Georges Franju.
France, 1949, 16mm, black & white, 22 min.
French with English subtitles.
One of France’s most important documentary filmmakers, Georges Franju established an international reputation with this poetic portrait of the slaughterhouse of La Vilette in Paris. The work of the abattoir is depicted with painful directness and in stark contrast to the calm domesticity of the surrounding Parisian suburb. In attempting “to restore to documentary reality its appearance of artifice,” he created a classic postwar document whose forcefulness and poetry remain undiminished today.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Children of Paradise
Fanny and Alexander
Milestones
Serge Daney: Journey of a Ciné-Son
Fanny and Alexander
Hiroshima mon amour
Children of Paradise
