Alain Resnais: Nuit et Brouillard
Now, this isn’t really the type of thing I set this blog up for. It was supposed to be a place for light, fluffy commentary and review rather than intense cinematic analysis. But in a few weeks, I’m planning on writing a socio-historical analysis of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers which is likely to be quite dense. So in order to prime you for that, this is half of an essay I wrote in my final semester of university on the cinematic representations of the Holocaust, dealing with Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog. It deals with some similar themes that I’ll be discussing when I get around to The Dreamers. I’ve ‘carefully’ integrated footnotes into the text rather than leave them out. I know I can’t be thrown out of the blog for plagiarism, but just put it down to habit.
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Over the years, many people have attempted to rationalise – to find some distancing logic in – the events of the Holocaust and the result is that they have come to view the atrocities as ‘crimes against humanity’ rather than culturally significant acts of violence (Samuel Moyn, ‘Two Regimes of Memory’ in The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (October 1998), pp. 1182-1186 (p. 1182)): the Holocaust has become a frightening concept rather than a terrifying period of history. Cinematic narrative has played its part in this, as the tricks of creating meaning and continuity in a film, of creating a logical cohesion, can also serve to rationalise the events and to place them into a framework where they are rendered easily digestible and understandable by the audience. In brief, narrative cinema, through its very technique, tries to rationalise the trauma of the Holocaust.
Rather than recreate history for the cinema, with Night and Fog, Alain Resnais made a film of disjointed narratives, which succeeds due to this very nature. The narrative can be divided into four separate parts: Resnais’ colour footage of a contemporary Auschwitz, the archive footage and photographs, the narrator’s text, and the musical score. Despite claims that the film acts as a totality, (André Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film, p. 122) I believe the opposite is true: the film’s narrative is splintered and imperfect and this is where it finds its power. The four parts do not work in unison in a traditional narrative sense, but rather work against each other, eliciting a tension which brings pertinent issues to the fore.
Firstly, the visual parts of the film: Resnais filmed colour footage of a contemporary Auschwitz and then juxtaposed it with black and white archive footage. This visual opposition raises an important question about the audience’s relationship with the memory of the Holocaust. As William Earle wrote, “Alain Resnais’ films… proceed to dissolve any assurance in a public reality by demonstrating the ambiguity of meaning in the present through its dependence on the past.”( William Earle, ‘Revolt against Realism in Films’ in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter 1968), pp. 145-151 (p. 151)). This statement is certainly true of Night and Fog. Today, Auschwitz has ceased to be a place and become a concept – a metonym for the Holocaust itself which exists in a perpetual 1943 (or thereabouts). In the viewer’s mind, Jews are still tattooed and killed en masse in gas chambers there: indeed, the camp was never liberated. It is for this reason that Resnais’ footage of a derelict and abandoned Auschwitz at the start of the film is so jarring, because this is how Auschwitz is today, and not how the viewer imagines it. When this is brought into contrast with the archive footage, the resulting tension between the two visual narratives brings into question Auschwitz’s signification, which is dependent on events which had taken place over ten years before the film was made. Therefore, it forces the viewer to reassess how he conceives of this particular place and the associations that go with it: to liberate Auschwitz in his mind.
Some have claimed that the archive footage of Night and Fog would have had an effect in 1955 which is now lost because it has since been overused and made familiar (Margaret Olin, ‘Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film’ in Represenations, No. 7 (Winter 1997), pp. 1-23 (p. 17)). While it is true that the previously unforeseen footage certainly would have been far more shocking in 1955, and that it has become familiar to today’s audience, the film unquestionably challenges our perception of it, although it may not tell an audience anything it does not already know about the genocide. Furthermore, it is the archive footage that provides the most obviously shocking material in the film. Resnais uses photos and footage from the camps: human skeletons, the gas chambers, mass graves, transports arriving. The main question this footage demands is who was filming this, and why? While Resnais is responsible for the colour section, the author of the secondary footage remains unknown, and this absence haunts the film as yet another phantom, the unknown spectator. More frightening, though, is the thought that this footage, unlike its subjects, survived. Likewise, the buildings themselves outlasted the short-term residents, and shows that the Nazis respected these material objects more than they did human life, another result of the tension between the empty contemporary Auschwitz and the archive footage littered with people.
Moreover, Resnais’ own footage, filmed in colour to contrast strongly with the dull, scratchy archive film is aware of its limitations in representation. Resnais’ visual style expresses his presence as investigator rather than witness: his camera is slow, hesitant, that of a respectful tourist, rather than someone familiar with the camp. In addition, the camera will often pan aimlessly, looking for something which it cannot locate. This is the case when it studies the sleeping quarters, which gives the impression that camera has never been there before, or that it does not know where to look because the space is unfamiliar. The camera will often stop and cut to footage, acknowledging that it cannot recreate what happened, such as at the hospital where his camera stops with a shot of the door and then Resnais chooses to cut to archive footage of the interior, and often the camera will retreat, simply unable to acknowledge the atrocities that were perpetrated there. Resnais camera only ever looks and presents images; it never analyses as it is impossible for Resnais, as a stranger to the camp, to give anything more than this superficial experience of it.
The analysis is provided in the text written by camp survivor Jean Cayrol which accompanies the two visual narratives. In fact, Resnais refused to make the film unless Cayrol, as a survivor, was involved. His text, spoken by a disembodied voice, paralleling the voiceless bodies the viewer sees in the film, is concerned to testify not against a nation but against a system which did not “respect the elementary rights of everyone to his own originality and particularity.”( Cayrol, quoted in Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, p. 49). Indeed, it is a work of great restraint by the poet, who provides a script which is sad rather than angry,( John Ward, Alain Resnais, or the Theme of Time, p. 143) and which asks questions rather then points the finger. It is interesting to note the way in which the text interacts with the visual narrative: at times it will be inverted, the text explaining or complimenting what we see – like the description of the hierarchy of the camps – or completely broken, the text not being able to find words to describe what is shown (André Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film, p. 125), and leaving the film to simply show what cannot be put into words. This is the case when the text says, “When the Allies arrived…”, then cuts off, unable to put into words what the archive footage shows: piles of emaciated corpses being tossed or bulldozed into mass graves. Cayrol even admits on one occasion that words fail him. The third use of the tension between visual and audible narratives is when the camera shows the contemporary Auschwitz and the text talks of the past, which has an effect identical to the one detailed above by the tension between the colour and archive footage. The text also has dark humour running through it, like when Cayrol points out the different kinds of architectural aesthetic for the camps (Alpine, garage, or Japanese style, or no style at all), or when he ironically observes the prison within the camp. This, along with the text’s unnerving lyricism, show that even Cayrol cannot represent his experience in any one medium, so he uses an assortment of poetry, humour, documented facts, and silence. His final statement, though, is untouched by such turmoil, as he delivers a stern warning to those who have forgotten:
“From this strange observatory, who watches to warn of new executioners? Do they really look so different to us? Somewhere among us remain undetected kapos, officers, informers. There are all those who didn’t believe, or only sometimes. And those of us who see the monster as being buried under these ruins, finding hope in being finally rid of this totalitarian disease, pretending to believe it happened once, in one country, not seeing what goes on around us, not heeding the unending cry.”
This is spoken over a visual of the remains of the camp, the text inverted and the narratives unified to reinforce the message, and cuts to black at the end to put a definitive ending to the film’s central message. It is also important to discuss the score. Resnais often claimed that he had “a certain taste for mixing sugar and salt”, (Quoted in Ibid., p. 127) and this is certainly true of the gentle music used throughout the film. While it perfectly compliments Resnais’ slow panoramas of a Polish landscape, it is much more unwelcome as an accompaniment to the archive footage, where the serene strings stand out in stark contrast to the scenes of misery, starvation and abuse presented on screen, making them appear more ghastly in contrast.
The film has many fragments brought together to form a montage of viewpoints. As Annette Insdorf points out, the film can be divided in such a way: Resnais/visitor/image vs. Cayrol/witness/voice (Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, p. 212). But she fails to point out two significant facts: Resnais only provides half the images, and Cayrol only provides the words and not the voice, which is supplied by actor Michel Bouquet. A more apt definition would be: Resnais/visitor/colour images, Cayrol/victim/text, ????/perpetrator or liberator/archive footage, and Bouquet/????/ narration. The result is that there is a multitude of narratives, some half-told and unclear. This montage of narratives, both visual and audible, demonstrates the embodiment of the need for multiple perspectives in dealing with the Holocaust, as Insdorf suggests (Ibid.). As François Truffaut wrote: “It is almost impossible to speak about this film in the vocabulary of cinematic criticism. It is not a documentary, or an indictment, or a poem, but a meditation on the most important phenomenon of the twentieth century… The power of this film… is rooted in its tone, the terrible gentleness… When we have looked at these strange, seventy-pound slave labourers, we understand that we’re not going to ‘feel better’ after seeing Night and Fog; quite the opposite.” (Quoted in Ibid., p. 39). In short, it is through the film’s fractured narrative, through its failure to represent any one clearly defined history, that it succeeds, not in recreating the concentration camp experience, but in presenting it to an audience in the most challenging way possible, even if this means doing so through unconventional means.
However, while Resnais’ film can be seen as hugely successful in several ways, some critics have identified many lacunae. Firstly, many complain that it did not confront Jewish victimhood at all. (Samuel Moyn, ‘Two Regimes of Memory’ in The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (October 1998), pp. 1182-1186 (p. 1184)). This is true in that the documentary footage used does not indicate the prisoners’ creed, but this is not Resnais’ fault, confined as he is with the choice of raw material in which any religious artefacts would have been confiscated by the Nazi guards. Cayrol’s text could have easily compensated but he chose not to. The reason for this may simply be that the concentration camps were not solely, but only principally, used for the extermination of Jews. Indeed, as many non-Jews were victimised under the Nazi regime, including homosexuals, the disabled, the elderly, and the mentally ill, this could be Resnais and Cayrol’s way of including everybody that was murdered in the camps and not just the majority. More importantly, the film is a meditation on the acts of dehumanising violence perpetrated by the Nazis and a warning against a similar regime rising to power, and works amiably within these parameters. It makes no claims to being a documentary of the continued victimisation of the Jew in western civilisations, and it is unfair to judge it one that criterion.
One criticism which cannot be so easily negated is the film’s failure to address France’s involvement in transporting prisoners to the camps: while the Germans responsible are shown in outtakes of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will and Himmler’s tour of inspection is shown in a photo montage, neither Maréchal Pétain nor any of the members of his puppet Vichy government are shown. Certainly, there are several sources which indicate that the French authorities, who provided the majority of the money for the film’s production, demanded cuts of shots of the transit camps to Auschwitz, Drancy and Pithiviers where the French police force is caught at work (R M Friedman, ‘Exorcising the Past: Jewish Figures in Contemporary Films’ in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19, No. 3 (July 1984), pp. 511-527 (p.514)) and another scene which included a concentration camp guard in French uniform. (Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, pp. 229-330, referenced in Olin, pp. 1-23 (p. 6)) These scenes have since been restored, but at that time the authorities obviously did not want proof of their collaboration to be shown because, while the 1950s were certainly a prosperous decade, much of this was dependant on Charles de Gaulle’s creation of the resistance myth, a revisionist history of what happened in France during the war. The duly elected collaborative government, French participation in transportation, and the ceasefire with Germany was rewritten as a France occupied by a neighbouring tyrant, victims of the Reich, a France which struggled alongside de Gaulle, the leader of the resistance during the war, to free itself. Nevertheless, the cuts to the film, which never contained abundant footage of the French involvement in the full version, were by no means drastic. Guy Austin writes that in the forward-looking ‘50s, Resnais’ film was a warning not to forget (Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction, p. 21), and it is indeed a powerful piece of film-making which successfully portrays Nazi atrocities, but as a cultural artefact of propaganda-ridden post-war France, through its silence it unfortunately perpetuates the same myth that it attempts to debunk.
************************************************
Over the years, many people have attempted to rationalise – to find some distancing logic in – the events of the Holocaust and the result is that they have come to view the atrocities as ‘crimes against humanity’ rather than culturally significant acts of violence (Samuel Moyn, ‘Two Regimes of Memory’ in The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (October 1998), pp. 1182-1186 (p. 1182)): the Holocaust has become a frightening concept rather than a terrifying period of history. Cinematic narrative has played its part in this, as the tricks of creating meaning and continuity in a film, of creating a logical cohesion, can also serve to rationalise the events and to place them into a framework where they are rendered easily digestible and understandable by the audience. In brief, narrative cinema, through its very technique, tries to rationalise the trauma of the Holocaust.
Rather than recreate history for the cinema, with Night and Fog, Alain Resnais made a film of disjointed narratives, which succeeds due to this very nature. The narrative can be divided into four separate parts: Resnais’ colour footage of a contemporary Auschwitz, the archive footage and photographs, the narrator’s text, and the musical score. Despite claims that the film acts as a totality, (André Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film, p. 122) I believe the opposite is true: the film’s narrative is splintered and imperfect and this is where it finds its power. The four parts do not work in unison in a traditional narrative sense, but rather work against each other, eliciting a tension which brings pertinent issues to the fore.
Firstly, the visual parts of the film: Resnais filmed colour footage of a contemporary Auschwitz and then juxtaposed it with black and white archive footage. This visual opposition raises an important question about the audience’s relationship with the memory of the Holocaust. As William Earle wrote, “Alain Resnais’ films… proceed to dissolve any assurance in a public reality by demonstrating the ambiguity of meaning in the present through its dependence on the past.”( William Earle, ‘Revolt against Realism in Films’ in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter 1968), pp. 145-151 (p. 151)). This statement is certainly true of Night and Fog. Today, Auschwitz has ceased to be a place and become a concept – a metonym for the Holocaust itself which exists in a perpetual 1943 (or thereabouts). In the viewer’s mind, Jews are still tattooed and killed en masse in gas chambers there: indeed, the camp was never liberated. It is for this reason that Resnais’ footage of a derelict and abandoned Auschwitz at the start of the film is so jarring, because this is how Auschwitz is today, and not how the viewer imagines it. When this is brought into contrast with the archive footage, the resulting tension between the two visual narratives brings into question Auschwitz’s signification, which is dependent on events which had taken place over ten years before the film was made. Therefore, it forces the viewer to reassess how he conceives of this particular place and the associations that go with it: to liberate Auschwitz in his mind.
Some have claimed that the archive footage of Night and Fog would have had an effect in 1955 which is now lost because it has since been overused and made familiar (Margaret Olin, ‘Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film’ in Represenations, No. 7 (Winter 1997), pp. 1-23 (p. 17)). While it is true that the previously unforeseen footage certainly would have been far more shocking in 1955, and that it has become familiar to today’s audience, the film unquestionably challenges our perception of it, although it may not tell an audience anything it does not already know about the genocide. Furthermore, it is the archive footage that provides the most obviously shocking material in the film. Resnais uses photos and footage from the camps: human skeletons, the gas chambers, mass graves, transports arriving. The main question this footage demands is who was filming this, and why? While Resnais is responsible for the colour section, the author of the secondary footage remains unknown, and this absence haunts the film as yet another phantom, the unknown spectator. More frightening, though, is the thought that this footage, unlike its subjects, survived. Likewise, the buildings themselves outlasted the short-term residents, and shows that the Nazis respected these material objects more than they did human life, another result of the tension between the empty contemporary Auschwitz and the archive footage littered with people.
Moreover, Resnais’ own footage, filmed in colour to contrast strongly with the dull, scratchy archive film is aware of its limitations in representation. Resnais’ visual style expresses his presence as investigator rather than witness: his camera is slow, hesitant, that of a respectful tourist, rather than someone familiar with the camp. In addition, the camera will often pan aimlessly, looking for something which it cannot locate. This is the case when it studies the sleeping quarters, which gives the impression that camera has never been there before, or that it does not know where to look because the space is unfamiliar. The camera will often stop and cut to footage, acknowledging that it cannot recreate what happened, such as at the hospital where his camera stops with a shot of the door and then Resnais chooses to cut to archive footage of the interior, and often the camera will retreat, simply unable to acknowledge the atrocities that were perpetrated there. Resnais camera only ever looks and presents images; it never analyses as it is impossible for Resnais, as a stranger to the camp, to give anything more than this superficial experience of it.
The analysis is provided in the text written by camp survivor Jean Cayrol which accompanies the two visual narratives. In fact, Resnais refused to make the film unless Cayrol, as a survivor, was involved. His text, spoken by a disembodied voice, paralleling the voiceless bodies the viewer sees in the film, is concerned to testify not against a nation but against a system which did not “respect the elementary rights of everyone to his own originality and particularity.”( Cayrol, quoted in Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, p. 49). Indeed, it is a work of great restraint by the poet, who provides a script which is sad rather than angry,( John Ward, Alain Resnais, or the Theme of Time, p. 143) and which asks questions rather then points the finger. It is interesting to note the way in which the text interacts with the visual narrative: at times it will be inverted, the text explaining or complimenting what we see – like the description of the hierarchy of the camps – or completely broken, the text not being able to find words to describe what is shown (André Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film, p. 125), and leaving the film to simply show what cannot be put into words. This is the case when the text says, “When the Allies arrived…”, then cuts off, unable to put into words what the archive footage shows: piles of emaciated corpses being tossed or bulldozed into mass graves. Cayrol even admits on one occasion that words fail him. The third use of the tension between visual and audible narratives is when the camera shows the contemporary Auschwitz and the text talks of the past, which has an effect identical to the one detailed above by the tension between the colour and archive footage. The text also has dark humour running through it, like when Cayrol points out the different kinds of architectural aesthetic for the camps (Alpine, garage, or Japanese style, or no style at all), or when he ironically observes the prison within the camp. This, along with the text’s unnerving lyricism, show that even Cayrol cannot represent his experience in any one medium, so he uses an assortment of poetry, humour, documented facts, and silence. His final statement, though, is untouched by such turmoil, as he delivers a stern warning to those who have forgotten:
“From this strange observatory, who watches to warn of new executioners? Do they really look so different to us? Somewhere among us remain undetected kapos, officers, informers. There are all those who didn’t believe, or only sometimes. And those of us who see the monster as being buried under these ruins, finding hope in being finally rid of this totalitarian disease, pretending to believe it happened once, in one country, not seeing what goes on around us, not heeding the unending cry.”
This is spoken over a visual of the remains of the camp, the text inverted and the narratives unified to reinforce the message, and cuts to black at the end to put a definitive ending to the film’s central message. It is also important to discuss the score. Resnais often claimed that he had “a certain taste for mixing sugar and salt”, (Quoted in Ibid., p. 127) and this is certainly true of the gentle music used throughout the film. While it perfectly compliments Resnais’ slow panoramas of a Polish landscape, it is much more unwelcome as an accompaniment to the archive footage, where the serene strings stand out in stark contrast to the scenes of misery, starvation and abuse presented on screen, making them appear more ghastly in contrast.
The film has many fragments brought together to form a montage of viewpoints. As Annette Insdorf points out, the film can be divided in such a way: Resnais/visitor/image vs. Cayrol/witness/voice (Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, p. 212). But she fails to point out two significant facts: Resnais only provides half the images, and Cayrol only provides the words and not the voice, which is supplied by actor Michel Bouquet. A more apt definition would be: Resnais/visitor/colour images, Cayrol/victim/text, ????/perpetrator or liberator/archive footage, and Bouquet/????/ narration. The result is that there is a multitude of narratives, some half-told and unclear. This montage of narratives, both visual and audible, demonstrates the embodiment of the need for multiple perspectives in dealing with the Holocaust, as Insdorf suggests (Ibid.). As François Truffaut wrote: “It is almost impossible to speak about this film in the vocabulary of cinematic criticism. It is not a documentary, or an indictment, or a poem, but a meditation on the most important phenomenon of the twentieth century… The power of this film… is rooted in its tone, the terrible gentleness… When we have looked at these strange, seventy-pound slave labourers, we understand that we’re not going to ‘feel better’ after seeing Night and Fog; quite the opposite.” (Quoted in Ibid., p. 39). In short, it is through the film’s fractured narrative, through its failure to represent any one clearly defined history, that it succeeds, not in recreating the concentration camp experience, but in presenting it to an audience in the most challenging way possible, even if this means doing so through unconventional means.
However, while Resnais’ film can be seen as hugely successful in several ways, some critics have identified many lacunae. Firstly, many complain that it did not confront Jewish victimhood at all. (Samuel Moyn, ‘Two Regimes of Memory’ in The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (October 1998), pp. 1182-1186 (p. 1184)). This is true in that the documentary footage used does not indicate the prisoners’ creed, but this is not Resnais’ fault, confined as he is with the choice of raw material in which any religious artefacts would have been confiscated by the Nazi guards. Cayrol’s text could have easily compensated but he chose not to. The reason for this may simply be that the concentration camps were not solely, but only principally, used for the extermination of Jews. Indeed, as many non-Jews were victimised under the Nazi regime, including homosexuals, the disabled, the elderly, and the mentally ill, this could be Resnais and Cayrol’s way of including everybody that was murdered in the camps and not just the majority. More importantly, the film is a meditation on the acts of dehumanising violence perpetrated by the Nazis and a warning against a similar regime rising to power, and works amiably within these parameters. It makes no claims to being a documentary of the continued victimisation of the Jew in western civilisations, and it is unfair to judge it one that criterion.
One criticism which cannot be so easily negated is the film’s failure to address France’s involvement in transporting prisoners to the camps: while the Germans responsible are shown in outtakes of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will and Himmler’s tour of inspection is shown in a photo montage, neither Maréchal Pétain nor any of the members of his puppet Vichy government are shown. Certainly, there are several sources which indicate that the French authorities, who provided the majority of the money for the film’s production, demanded cuts of shots of the transit camps to Auschwitz, Drancy and Pithiviers where the French police force is caught at work (R M Friedman, ‘Exorcising the Past: Jewish Figures in Contemporary Films’ in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19, No. 3 (July 1984), pp. 511-527 (p.514)) and another scene which included a concentration camp guard in French uniform. (Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, pp. 229-330, referenced in Olin, pp. 1-23 (p. 6)) These scenes have since been restored, but at that time the authorities obviously did not want proof of their collaboration to be shown because, while the 1950s were certainly a prosperous decade, much of this was dependant on Charles de Gaulle’s creation of the resistance myth, a revisionist history of what happened in France during the war. The duly elected collaborative government, French participation in transportation, and the ceasefire with Germany was rewritten as a France occupied by a neighbouring tyrant, victims of the Reich, a France which struggled alongside de Gaulle, the leader of the resistance during the war, to free itself. Nevertheless, the cuts to the film, which never contained abundant footage of the French involvement in the full version, were by no means drastic. Guy Austin writes that in the forward-looking ‘50s, Resnais’ film was a warning not to forget (Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction, p. 21), and it is indeed a powerful piece of film-making which successfully portrays Nazi atrocities, but as a cultural artefact of propaganda-ridden post-war France, through its silence it unfortunately perpetuates the same myth that it attempts to debunk.
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