Night And Fog Sparknotes

In the documentary Night and Fog, Alain Resnais shows footage from the Nazi Germany execution camps. Throughout the film there are photos of individuals being dehumanized. Resnais wanted to expose the truth behind what occurred at these concentration camps. Humans seem to struggle to acknowledge the hellish world people lived through in Nazi Germany. In the documentary Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris’s wants to get the truth right when retelling the story of a man who was falsely convicted of a crime. Morris strives to find out the truth using multiple perspectives to try to ascertain what actually happened the night a police officer was murdered.

The struggle of accepting the truth is demonstrated in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave there are

prisoners who have lived in a cave their entire lives. The prisoners have been tied up and can only view the shadows presented in front of them. The shadows are made from puppets holding up statues, which the prisoners view as reality. One day a prisoner escapes the cave and is blinded by the light from the sun. This signifies how his eyes had to adjust and take in the new reality he has been exposed to. He then recognizes that what he was seeing in the cave was not real and feels an obligation to share this truth with the other prisoners. However, when he presents the prisoners with the news they do not believe him.
After the prisoner had spent his entire life in the cave he has trouble looking into the light and accepting the truth, similar to what the class experienced while watching Night and Fog. Socrates equates accepting the truth to looking into the sun for the first time because it is threatening and painful; similar to how one feels watching Resnais’s film. Plato proclaims that knowledge of reality comes at the price of innocence. An individual has to be willing to accept the truth, even if it is painful like the graphic images showed in Resnais’s film.
Resnais made this film as a cautionary sign to “puts its viewers on alert, in a position to defend themselves against any revivals of the spirit that made the camps possible” (Roth Power Point 223). Resnais wants his viewers to confront the atrocities of the past, in hopes that it will empower future generations to never let it occur again.
Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris tells a story about two men who are convicted of the same crime; however, one man is falsely excused while the guilty man is set free.

In 1976 Randall Dale Adam’s car breaks down and he is offered a ride by another teenager, David Harris, who, unbeknownst to Adams, was driving a stolen vehicle. When they are stopped by a police officer, multiple shots are fired, killing the officer. When this case was sent to court the jury strongly believes Adam is guilty of the murder. However, Errol Morris exposes misleading witnesses’ testimonies and police misbehavior that led to the jury conviction of the wrong man.

The truth is discovered through language, not through pictures. Photos can be misleading and are subjected to one’s references in the world. Throughout the film Randall Dale Adams who was innocent was always photographed with messy frizzy hair, a thick mustache and in his late 20’s. However, David Harris, who was guilty of murdering a police officer, was photographed as an innocent, scared young white boy with no facial hair. However, Morris believes just looking at a photo will tell you nothing. Truth only comes from the relationship between language and

world.
Morris studies the pursuit of truth and how people avoid it. He states “I wanted to make a movie about how truth is difficult to know, not how it is impossible to know” (Morris). Like in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the prisoner has a hard time facing the truth. Some people would argue that ambiguity is pleasing however; Morris would say the exact opposite. He believes that ambiguity is an excuse for seeking the truth and reprehensible.