I first saw the 1955 documentary Night and Fog while taking Father Bruce’s Understanding Religion. He shows the relatively short yet impactful documentary during the unit on morality and evil before watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Usually in this weekly night class we would take our tests at the end of class so that students would not leave early. This night was not like that. We took our tests first because he had found that many people would become extremely distraught after watching these films, and it caused their grades to suffer. Since seeing it the first time, I find myself thinking about it often, but it was not until this week where I re-watched it with Herzog’s “On the Absolute, Sublime and Ecstatic Truth” in the back of my mind that I fully understood what the documentary truth of the film is to me.
For those of you who have not seen the film, Night and Fog is a documentary about the Holocaust and was released 10 years after the liberation of the concentration camps. The documentary shows actual wartime images and videos taken from concentration camps along side footage of the abandoned camps. The documentary is ultimately extremely haunting and makes you question humanity’s capacity for such violence. The film shows the life in the concentration camps, including vivid images of the torture, experiments, and executions committed in these now abandoned places.
In his article “On the Absolute, Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth”, Werner Herzog presents the idea of the ecstatic truth which comes from the greek word ekstasis meaning to stand outside of oneself. The ecstatic truth is the experience of truth that brings a person outside of themselves. Herzog argues that the only way to experience this truth is through art. The ecstatic truth Night and Fog reveals is the capacity of evil that humans can exhibit.
The sublime is the idea that we experience things that are too vast to understand. Like the ocean, they can be overwhelming and beautiful, but terrifying in their vastness. The truth that art gives us is something that must be understood through a power within ourselves, like our imagination. Documentary truth reveals the sublime and the ecstatic truth to us. Unlike what Plato says, Herzog argues that the simple reality cannot be the truth anymore. This documentary revealed truths about the Holocaust that were unknown to everyone across the world even during the war. The image and videos recorded during the time the concentration camps were active revealed the gruesome truths that to an extent needed to be seen to be believed.
Reading your post about how the truths of something so massively terrible could be difficult to accept for some people made me wonder about those who say the Holocaust never happened. Now, obviously you have people simply doing it for attention (losers). And then you have those who sympathized with what the Nazis were doing (bigger losers). But there are still people out there who genuinely believe the Holocaust was made up despite the multitude of footage and pictures we have, the abandoned concentration camps, and the stories of survivors and the soldiers who liberated them. This made me wonder if the truth of it all was simply too much for them to handle, and deciding none of it happened was just easier.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to think that people really don't understand it until they see it. I've learned about the Holocaust growing up but I didn't see the images or videos until I watched documentaries about it. And that did make it feel more real. It is horrifying that people can do that to others. There are those out there who still deny that these things really happened. It is possible that it is just so terrible that they won't allow themselves to see the truth.
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