The contemporaneity of memory is a theme that haunts, as it informs,every Alain Resnais film. In 1956 (thirty years before Claude Lanzmann'sShoah) Resnais filmed an extraordinary study of the Nazi death camps,and the human capacity to remember and forget. Night and Fog is acompilation of black-and-white archival material-documents, photographsand newsreels of the machine and its victims-and an exploration ofAuschwitz as it is today, measured in slow tracking shots, in full colorthat glares with truth. The film owes equally to Resnais' vision and tothat of his collaborators, the writer Jean Cayrol, himself aconcentration camp survivor, and composer Hanns Eisler, who was drivenout of Hitler's Germany. Eisler's music is essential to the viewing ofthe film, working not in opposition to but in counterpoint to imagesotherwise too grotesque to take in. Resnais has explained that "the moreviolent the images are, the gentler is the music. Eisler wanted to showthat the optimism and hope of man always existed in the background."