represents the peak of director Alain Resnais' activities as a short-subject filmmaker. Framed as a documentary, the film is an unsettling view of life inside the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. As he would in his later features ( , et. al.) Resnais toys with chronology, with memory becoming present reality and vice versa at several critical junctures. Jean Cayrol, later responsible for the script of Resnais' (1962), wrote the narration for . The film was originally released in France as .