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, photographs, and newsreels of the machine and its victims-and an exploration of Auschwitz as it is today, measured in slow tracking shots, in full color that glares with truth. The film owes equally to Resnais's vision and to that of his collaborators, the writer Jean Cayrol, himself a concentration camp survivor, and composer Hanns Eisler, who was driven out of Hitler's Germany. Eisler's music is essential to the viewing of the film, working not in opposition to but in counterpoint to images otherwise too grotesque to take in.