The Holocaust rightly provokes passionate emotional reactions, which have on occasion prompted strong artistic responses. The old and valid argument says that to reduce the sheer scale of what happened to the level of personal drama inevitably trivialises the suffering, but the counter argument, equally valid, suggests that the only way cinema can effectively convey to an audience the horror of such events is through personal stories. Just as we have trouble imagining the concept of an infinite universe, when you list the number of dead in millions it is simply beyond what most people can comprehend. But imagine that included in those millions are your entire immediate family, and think about what that would mean to you. Now imagine that those figures also include everyone you ever met, and their families, and their friends and their families. You're starting to get the picture, but you're still not even close.

Many a feature film has attempted to communicate the horror of the experience of the Nazi death camps with varying degrees of success. In the end they all fall victim to that same criticism, that they reduce the enormity of the Holocaust to background action against which personal dramas can be played out. But audiences tend to connect with individual experience, as they would with someone they know. It becomes personal. The bottom line, however, is that any feature film, and most especially one with a lot of money invested in it, will eventually shy away from the extremes of what really happened. The film-makers want the audience to react emotionally, to engage with the characters, to understand the suffering, but to present them with the full graphical reality of just what took place risks upsetting or offending the very people who will put that movie into profit.

Documentaries, for the most part, do not suffer the same constrains, and have always been more successful at communicating the bigger picture, and the Holocaust in particular has been well served by the medium, both in the quantity and quality of the work produced. If Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half hour Shoah (1985) stands as the definitive modern work on the subject, then Alain Resnais' 1955 Night and Fog must be regarded as an essential companion piece, a work of equal importance and power. Where Lanzmann approaches the experience from a personal level, structuring his film around the recollections of camp survivors, witnesses and ex-Nazis, Resnais' film, while also from a personal viewpoint, concentrates on the bigger picture, a journey that began with anti-semitism and ended in mass extermination. The narration, written by Mauthausen concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol and delivered by actor Michel Bouquet with a mixture of sober reflection, scepticism and suppressed anger, equates the rounding up of the Jewish population and their transportation to the camps to an industrial process, effectively communicating the cold inhumanity of what took place.

Made just ten years after the end of the war, this was for many their first direct exposure to the full horror of the Nazi concentration camps. Opening with newly shot colour footage of the then deserted camps, overtaken by greenery and giving little hint of what once took place there, the slow, gentle tracking shots of these sequences give way to heroically framed images of Germany's new rulers and their supporters lifted from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and then to stills and footage shot by the Nazis themselves of the rounding up of the Jewish population and their arrival at the camps. The switches from the colour footage to the archive material are perfectly judged - the trains that roll into the camps at night cutting to a slow drift along similar tracks, now overgrown with weeds, the camera coming to rest on its grim destination like the terrible memory it is.

For a modern audience, aware of what took place through education, literature, film and television, even the loading of human cargo into the trains provokes a shudder of realisation, but this also raises the danger of familiarity, of a tale often told that we feel we already know well enough, knowledge that a film made back in 1955 cannot possibly expand on. This would be a mistake, as Night and Fog's approach to its subject is unlike any other film on the holocaust you are likely to have seen. A key aspect of this is its chilling sense of understatement, often achieved through suggestion and a choice use of words. Thus the lengthy tracking shots of the primitive latrines and wooden three-to-a-hole sleeping areas in the abandoned camps are as powerful as the archive photos of prisoners, stripped of all dignity, forced to stand naked on parade for hours at a time. As the camera drifts past the camp hospital, with its false hope of medical treatment and a soft bed, the narration talks of unnecessary operations and amputations, not always carried out by medical personnel, and the colour footage gives way to stark black-and-white stills of the operating tables, one of which has a guillotine attached and a drain below for the blood. At times, the narration itself seems to step back in disgust, leaving the details to our imagination: "Useless to try and describe what went on in these cells," we are told of the prison block (an absurd enough notion in what is already the worst kind of prison camp). "In cages designed so that inmates could neither stand nor lie down, men and women were methodically tortured for days on end. The air vents were not soundproof."

It is in the final stages of the film that Resnais takes a more direct approach and exposes us to the true horror that until then we have been creating largely in our minds. Bodies that are burned, starved, mutilated and decapitated, bones turned into fertiliser, skin used by guards for paper to draw pornographic pictures - this is sickening footage that you want to turn away from and absolutely should not. And despite this, the most disturbing shot of all is a slow pull back to reveal a mountainous pile of women's hair that has been shorn from the heads of arriving inmates, an image that conveys the sheer scale of what happened better than anything I have ever seen. "At 15 pfennigs a kilo," we are informed, "it's used for making cloth."

François Truffaut said of Night and Fog that it was "Not a documentary, or an indictment, or a poem, but a meditation on the most important phenomenon of the twentieth century," and novelist Philip Lopate has called it an "antidocumentary," and though I find myself in complete agreement, I would also argue that, especially viewed from a modern perspective, it stands as one of the most extraordinary examples of the documentary film par excellence - it is factual, educational and yet also personal and political in all the ways that more recent high profile works of the genre have been championed for. Though it does not provide detailed history of the process that led to the holocaust, it connects the audience to those who suffered and survived it far more effectively than any of the feature films that have used the concentration camps as a dramatic device, however well intentioned, and at just 31 minutes in length does so with extraordinary economy. Fifty years after its release, Night and Fog remains a disturbing, upsetting, brilliant example of the documentary film at its most powerful and affecting, and a devastating warning from history that seems to have repeatedly gone unheeded. "War nods off to sleep," the film warns us at its conclusion, "but keeps one eye always open."

Picture

The two DVDs under examination here are the recently released UK disk from Nouveaux Pictures, and the already available US disk from Criterion. Neither of the disks are regionally encoded, though the Nouveaux release is PAL and the Criterion NTSC.

Both disks claim to be remastered from a restored print, and it seems likely that the same film source was used for both transfers. That the archive footage has suffered from occasionally severe scratches, dust spots and damage is not surprising nor is it an issue, given that we are used to seeing wartime news footage in such a condition. The damage is on the original archive film and would likely also have appeared on the cinema print when Night and Fog was first screened. One short sequence of a train departing suffers from severe frame jitter, usually a projection fault caused by a too-small loop above or below the lens or sprocket damage. Again this may have been on the original film, as it occurs only on one piece of footage and is intercut with another, perfectly stable shot and appears on both DVDs.

The transfer on both disks is very good, given the age and source material, with contrast fine when the material allows it to be (the contrast on some of the photographs is inevitably harsh, while on others a little grayed out). The definition is fine on the newer footage on both prints, though the edge would probably have to go to the Criterion disk, which displays a slightly higher level of fine detail. The colour, however, is richer on the Nouveaux disk, having something of a faded look on the Criterion disk when played on a computer monitor, but looking more naturalistic than that on the Nouveaux disk on a TV screen.

It should be noted that though only a 31 minute film, the Criterion disk includes 6 chapter stops, while the Nouveaux disk has none.

Extras