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Resnais' picture certainly established a standard point of perspective — the retrospective reckoning — that would be adopted and focused further not only in the filmmaker's subsequent work but in that of Lanzmann, Marker, Godard, Akerman, and others. A method of forensic-science: train the camera, magnify the evidence. Observe the brilliant opening shot upon docile pasture, as the camera cranes down like the very Geist or omniscient prodigy only to reveal barbed wire fences in parallax relation.

In February 1956, Truffaut wrote in Cahiers du cinéma of "the most noble and necessary film ever made." It was only thirty minutes long, featured no stars, and was directed by a young film editor whose name was little known outside the intellectual circles of the Left Bank of Paris. Sixty years later, that work, Night and Fog, is generally acknowledged as one of the great classics of cinema, and its restoration now allows us to appreciate fully this remarkable encounter between film and history.

Rather than proffering a thesis about the events, as one might expect from a more conventional documentary, Resnais and Cayrol test the limits of cinema's capacity for response to both tragedy and misery by contesting the aesthetic norms of dealing with taboo subject matter.

Lower the camera and the pastoral sprawl is suddenly tangled in barbed wire, memory and cinema are like that. How does one contemplate something like the Holocaust? ...Mountains of hair and bowls of decapitated heads; "I'm not responsible" is the byword at Nuremberg. The greatest of Resnais' early shorts, a haunted litany about unspeakable events barely a decade old, the madness of history and the sin of forgetfulness.

Commentators have generally agreed that it is precisely Resnais' obsession with and mastery of form that gives Nuit et brouillard an emotional power unequalled by any fictional reconstruction of the Holocaust. The near-digressions of the subtly orchestrated and edited filmic narration and the ironies of the commentary capture and focus the viewer's attention, ensuring that the most horrible images... are seen with clear eyes, and that therefore their human meaning cannot be avoided.

Arguably one of the finest documentaries ever captured on film, Night and Fog opens with the fluid, horizontal tracking of an idyllic, seemingly impressionistic, barren countryside... Using highly unsettling, archival footage recorded during postwar liberation contrasted against the stillness of the modern-day landscape, Resnais creates a powerful, haunting chronicle of cruelty, dehumanization, and denial of personal responsibility.

Only half an hour long, this is the greatest film ever made about the concentration camps (1956). Directed by Alain Resnais from a script by camp survivor Jean Cayrol (who subsequently scripted Muriel), it's a perfect riposte to the eyewash of a New Yorker writer a few years back that Resnais, like Bergman, is noted for his "metaphysical touch." If there's a less metaphysical movie on the subject of the camps I haven't seen it.