Hôtel des Invalides (Georges Franju, 1951)
Le Six juin à l'aube (Jean Grémillon, 1945)
Nuit et brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1956)

In Hôtel des Invalides (28 mins, B&W), Georges Franju uses collision and juxtaposition to make strange the all-too-familiar, a tour of Paris's famed war museum. What the army thought would be a prestige documentary is a poetic attack on the tragic banality of military heroics. And Maurice Jarre's music jars with its false gaiety. In Jean Grémillon's June 6 at Dawn (39 mins, B&W), ruins, broken statues, and shattered trees paint a portrait of the devastation of Normandy following the Allied landings. Grémillon, who as a trained musician also composed the film's score, registers the pall of sadness left on the land by war. In 1956, Alain Resnais made the challenging Night and Fog (30 mins, B&W/Color), a study of the Nazi death camps and the human capacity to remember and forget. It is a compilation of archival materials on the death machine and its victims, measured in piles of shoes, truckloads of bodies; and an exploration of Auschwitz in the present, in slow tracking shots in full color that somehow offers an even more inescapable reality than the photos and newsreels. The film owes equally to Resnais's collaborators, the writer and camp survivor Jean Cayrol and the German exile composer Hanns Eisler.