More on Night and Fog

I'm glad you wrote about Night and Fog Ryan. I feel the same way you do about it... I'm sure most of the class does. As we all scatter to finish our web-pages and manage to fit some blogging in, we take for granted that this is the biggest problem(hopefully) we will face this weekend. As a generation we are so famously "desensitized" to violence from the cartoons we watched growing up to the news footage of global terror. Night and Fog was something stronger though. It was difficult to view and the urge to look away put knots in my stomach as my eyes remained fixed on the most horrific of sights. This was not Hollywood, it is something entirely different, authentic and piercing. What gave me the deepest feeling of disturbance was surprisingly not the bulldozer plowing corpses into a mass grave, or the idea that the hospital was a biological test facility condemning patients to death.. it was the warehouse full of hair. This may seem dull compared to emaciated bodies hung from barbed wire, but I can not shake the feeling of nausea even as I write this to imagine just how many people it would take to produce that much hair! I think about my own head and the rest of our class. There are a decent amount of girls with long hair. Yet even if each of our heads was shaved I doubt it would take more than one book bag to contain it all. The camera had to pan and zoom out to even display the mountains of lost locks. I think this film really connected to Barthes and Kuhn when considering the images from a historical/cultural perspective. We evaluate the holocaust from certain established denotations. Like Ryan said "Hitler was Bad" "The Holocaust was a tragedy." There is something about the raw images that accelerate the (connotation) punctum and make you feel something you can not describe every single time.

-Sam