Night and Fog and Other Short Documentaries

Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard)

1955, 32 mins. Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet. Resnais contrasts haunting tracking shots through present-day Auschwitz with devastating archival footage filmed just after liberation, to create one of the most powerful documentaries ever made.

Guernica

1950, 12 mins. Fragmented images of paintings and sculptures by Picasso from 1906 to the creation of his famous anti-war painting Guernica are set against an ode by surrealist poet Paul Eluard, in a cubist study that comments on Spain’s ongoing struggles against fascism.

Statues Also Die (Les statues meurent aussi)

1953, 27 mins. Dir. Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Written by Marker. Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet. Rarely screened, this rich essay film about art, mortality, and history that looks at the place of African culture within European civilization, is a remarkable collaboration between Resnais and Chris Marker, filled with themes of their work to come. “If you come across it in any venue that’s showing a Resnais retrospective, you should drop everything to go and see it,” writes Jonathan Rosenbaum.

All the Memory of the World (Toute la mémoire du monde)

1956, 22 mins. Music by Maurice Jarre. Foretelling the visual style of Last Year at Marienbad, this meditation on knowledge is comprised of a series of haunting tracking shots through endless shelves of newspapers and books at the French National Library. “Confronted with these bulging repositories,” intones the narrator, “man is assailed by fear of being engulfed by this mass of words.”

Free with Museum admission.

Related

• Moving Image Source: A suppressed masterpiece by Resnais and Marker
• Moving Image Source: Depictions of the Holocaust
• Moving Image Source: Introduction to Shoah and the Cinema