Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) - 1955

Made ten years after the end of the Second World War, one can only imagine how massive the impact was when Alain Resnais Holocaust documentary premiered. That is still manages to shock, horrify and overwhelm is not merely a reinforcement of the tragedy which befell the Jews during World War Two but is also a stamp of the genius Resnais used to create the film.

Both the writer Jean Cayrol and composer Hanns Eisler were liberated from concentration camps, and it was not until Cayrol came onboard that Resnais, originally reluctant, agreed to direct the film. The film cuts between historical footage and photographs of the time as well as footage of the camps, including Auschwitz, as they were in 55, abandoned, seemingly innocuous and yet somehow containing the horrors which took place. The imagery itself is harrowing, especially the footage of dead bodies being piled on top of each other - their bodies looking like nothing more than sacks of bones.

There are no subjects the film shies away from with experiments, prostitution, torture, the gas chambers and executions who shown either in found footage or photographs.

The film ends with the liberation of the camps across and questions who was responsible for them.

The power of Night and Fog in undiminished, even 50 years on, and there is not another film which has addressed the issue is such an honest and impressionable way. Rarely is cinema this brilliant.