Aesthetics as political resistance in Alain Resnais's Night and fog (1955)

Concentrationary cinema used radical techniques of montage and disorientation, camera movements, and counterpointed commentary to puncture the normality of post-war reconstruction. There are several famous films in the genre, but scholars of literature, film, and history focus here on Night and Fog as the classic. Among their topics are the rescue of an abandoned film, Resnais and the dead, Auschwitz as allegory, post-traumatic cinema, cinema as a slaughterhouse of history, and the responsibility of aesthetics in Night and Fog (1955) and Kapo (1959). Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).