​

 

Night and Fog focuses on the victims. It uses archival footage to show the atrocities that happened at the concentration camps. It shows decapitated Jews laying down next to a basket full of their heads. It shows the Nazis making soap out of the fat from the corpses. It shows a bulldozer pushing corpses into a pit full of more corpses. It shows a room completely filled with the hair from all the Jews that had been at that camp. It scars you with images that reinforce how inhuman the Nazi regime was and remind you that this was real and should never happen again. 

It splices in contemporary footage of the concentration camps and shows how much lies within the ruins, like when it shows the walls and ceilings of the gas chambers that still display the scratch marks from the Jews trying desperately to escape the place. It shows the train tracks overgrown with vegetation. Without context they’re just old railroads. The film reminds us that these tracks that the cameraman stood on are the same tracks that transported millions of people directly to their ultimate demise, and we realize why the tracks aren’t used anymore.

I think that this film is told using the poetic mode. A lot of the shots were used to creatively tell emotion, like the camera following the rails and the camera tilting up to reveal more and more hair. It also seemed rhythmic in nature, showing shots of the horrific past then cutting to its present ruins. It also focused more on feelings/emotions than fact. You leave this film feeling deeply disturbed.

​

​

The Act of Killing follows around the perpetrators as they reenact their executions of supposed communists for the camera. Throughout the film, the main killer, Anwar, recreated several setups to show how he used to kill people. One of these methods was strangulation with a wire. Anwar frequently called himself a gangster and said he got many of his ideas from movies like The Godfather and several other American crime films. At the start of the film, Anwar was smiling as he pretended to strangle his friend in the same location where he actually did that to 10s to 100s of people. There was no archival footage and no video of anyone actually dying unlike the other film. Although the reenactments aren’t as brutal as seeing actual footage, later in the film when Anwar realizes what he’s done the gut wrenching emotion of the effects of this genocide kicks in.

At the end of this film, Anwar watches back all of the scenes of him reenacting his killings, and the realization of the weight of what he had done to so many people finally sets in. He starts to cry and asks the cameraman “Have I sinned?” Then he goes to the place where he strangled so many people at the start of the film and tries to convince himself that he had to perform the killings, but in that moment he cannot stop himself from gagging and retching as he relives the strangulations in his head, maybe from the perspective of the victims. This film is different in the way that Night and Fog discusses genocide because it is told from the killer’s rather than the victim’s perspective, and it shows that even the most vile people on Earth should unfortunately still be considered human.

​

​

In conclusion, Night and Fog and The Act of Killing are similar in that they both focus on reliving the past to remind us about the hidden horrors of war and genocide, although they handle this in different ways—archival footage or reenactment. They are different in that Night and Fog focuses on the effects it has on the victims, and the loss/degradation of humanity associated with it, while The Act of Killing focuses on the effects it has on the killers, and how they should still be seen as human even though they are evil. Although it feels uncomfortable to be put into a position of feeling some sympathy for the killer, these differences help to illustrate how war and genocide have significant negative impacts to everyone who is involved.