Letter from Siberia, Chris Marker's essay-documentary made in 1957, remains fresh and relevant today. Combining fantasy animation (of woolly mammoths and mammoth buildings) and documentary photography, Marker displays above all his amazement at the diversity of Siberia, at once pre-historic and post-revolutionary. Marker's cine-essays are the antithesis of the omniscient documentary voice, and he satirizes that particular dinosaur in one hilarious segment which is shown twice-once with a capitalist propaganda voice-over and once with a Soviet one. The contemporaneity of memory is a theme that haunts as it informs every Alain Resnais film. In 1956 (thirty years before Claude Lanzmann's Shoah), Resnais filmed an extraordinary study of the Nazi death camps and the human capacity to remember and forget. Night and Fog is a compilation of black-and-white archival material-documents of the machine and its victims-and an exploration of Auschwitz now (that is, in 1956), measured in slow tracking shots and in full color that glares with truth. The film owes equally to Resnais' collaborators, the writer Jean Cayrol, himself a concentration-camp survivor, and composer Hanns Eisler, who was driven out of Hitler's Germany. Eisler's compositions provide a gentle optimism in counterpoint to images otherwise too grotesque to take in. Chris Marker was Resnais' assistant director, and both films are graced with the cinematography of Sacha Vierny.