Saturday Night Cinema: Night and Fog (1956)

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Tonight’s Saturday Night classic is Alain Resnais’s terrible masterpiece, Night and Fog. Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek in Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), one of the first cinematic reflections on the Holocaust. Juxtaposing the stillness of the abandoned camps’ empty buildings with haunting wartime footage, Resnais investigates humanity’s capacity for violence, and presents the devastating suggestion that such horrors could occur again. François Truffaut once called Night and Fog “the greatest film ever made.” (Criterion Collection)

“The effective war film is often the one in which the action begins after the war, when there is nothing but ruins and desolation everywhere: Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1947) and, above all, Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard, the greatest film ever made.”

Around the tenth anniversary of the liberation of France, a French government agency decided to produce a documentary about Nazi concentration camps. A promising young man named Alain Resnais, who would later become a famous director, was recruited. At first he refused, stating that only a survivor should make such a film. But he came around, and the film that resulted, Night and Fog, became a French national sensation.

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Resnais made this disturbing 32-minute documentary only 10 years after the liberation of the Nazi camps, exposing in devastating details a horrific monstrosity ….

Of all the films made about the Holocaust, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) is quite possibly the most moving and thought-provoking, James Kendric, Network Film Desk

Only half an hour long, this is the greatest film ever made about the concentration camps. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (nuit et brouillard) runs barely over 30 minutes, yet it manages to pack a lifetime of horrors into its half-hour length. Matt Brunson

The rap against most Holocaust films is that they exploit the audience’s feelings of outrage and sorrow for commercial ends; and, by pretending to put us vicariously through such a staggeringly incomprehensible experience, they trivialize, reducing it to sentimental melodrama. Alain Resnais has done nothing of the kind. Making this film in 1955, only ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps, with the wounds so fresh, he did not presume, first of all, to speak for the victims and survivors of the camps: he chose as his screenwriter the novelist Jean Cayrol, a man who had actually been imprisoned in one. Second, neither he nor Cayrol presumed to offer a comprehensive guide to the concentration camp universe. Quite the contrary: the voiceover is filled with skepticism and doubt, and a sympathetic awareness of the viewer’s resistance, conscious or unconscious, to grasping the unthinkable. “Useless to describe what went on in these cells,” and “Words are insufficient,” we are told again and again in the voiceover narration. “No description, no picture can reveal their true dimension.” And: “Is it in vain that we try to remember?” Meanwhile, the viewer is calmly given information about the Nazis’ extermination procedures. Thus the dialectic is set up between the necessity of remembering, and the impossibility of doing so.

Night and Fog is, in effect, an antidocumentary: we cannot “document” this particular reality, it is too heinous, we would be defeated in advance. What can we do, then? Resnais’ and Cayrol’s answer is: we can reflect, ask questions, examine the record, and interrogate our own responses. In short, offer up an essay. Moreover, by choosing to compress such enormous subject matter into only a half-hour (think, by contrast, of Claude Lanzmann’s over-nine-hour Shoah, [1985]), the filmmakers force themselves into the epigrammatic concision and synthesis of essayistic reflection.

This effort at analysis and reflection is one of the ways the filmmakers work to evade pious sentimentality: indeed, the voiceover narration (masterfully spoken by Michel Bouquet) is delivered in a harsh, dry, astringent tone, filled with ironic shadings (though, according to the filmmaker himself, he asked Bouquet to deliver his lines in a “neutral tone”). The magnificent score by Hanns Eisler is also employed ironically: the lovely, lyrical flute passages collide with harrowing images, the Schoenbergian pizzicato strings signal the revving up of the Nazi machine. (Just as Cayrol’s text is unusually elegant, dense, and poetic for a film voiceover, so the Eisler score is not your typical movie background music, but a modern composition that has since been performed in concert halls.)

The visuals mix color photography, for the present, and black-and-white, for the past. While some of the black-and-white stills and film footage are absolutely horrific (the shoveled corpses, the piles of women’s hair), there is no attempt to recapture that horror in the present-day footage of the camps. Resnais, by his own admission, strove there for “the most realistic color, the most faithful reproduction of the actual place.” The color photography uses a tentative, probing, tracking shot and panning approach. “We go slowly along them, looking for what?” the narrator asks dubiously. In brooding about the connection between location and history, architecture and death, the film makes the ironic point that the buildings of each concentration camp went up matter-of-factly, by ordinary construction methods (“contractors, estimates, competitive bids, and no doubt a bribe or two”), that the watchtowers had different design mannerisms (“Swiss style, garage style, Japanese style”), that they could even be picture-postcard pretty, that “nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary blockhouse.” Past and present finally converge in a chilling pan shot of a ceiling, over which the narrative voice tells us: “The only sign—but you have to know—is this ceiling, dug into by fingernails. Even the concrete was torn.” This “but you have to know” (mais il faut savoir, in the original French) has a double meaning: a) you wouldn’t see it unless tipped off to what it meant and; b) you must take this in now, you can no longer escape knowing it.

The black-and-white archival footage and the color photography are conjoined entirely by straight cuts, no process shots, and the whole is a triumph of editing. We remember that Resnais began in movies as an editor, and his first films, shorts that also included Van Gogh, Guernica, Les Statues meurent aussi, and All the Memory of the World, were all impressive assemblages, which accentuated by montage the disjunctions and continuities between past and present. Night and Fog looks forward, in Resnais’ career, to other films that would obsess over memory and forgetfulness, such as Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Muriel (1963), and Providence (1977).

This film also anticipates, and helps bring about, a whole fascinating, cutting-edge genre, the essay-film, championed especially by Chris Marker (who collaborated with Resnais on this film as well as Les Statues meurent aussi), practiced as well by such diverse figures as Michael Moore, Jean-Luc Godard, Ross McElwee, Harun Farocki, Yvonne Rainer, and Raul Ruiz. All these filmmakers have rejected the objective neutrality presumptions of traditional documentaries, and have striven to turn film into a medium expressive of idiosyncratic, personal thought.

Finally, it may be well to take up the suggestion by Truffaut, quoted earlier, that Night and Fog has tremendous significance as a film against war, against violence itself. Movies that purport to dramatize “War is hell” almost inevitably make the experience of battle glamorous and exciting. Only by looking back reflectively and trying to understand the sufferings and disasters of history, “when there is nothing but ruins and desolation,” can we commit ourselves to prevent further atrocities—a point made loud and clear in the final voiceover, which for once abandons its tone of modest scrutiny and allows itself a moment of well-earned, didactic passion.

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livingengine
livingengine
5 years ago

“Resnais investigates humanity’s capacity for violence, and presents the devastating suggestion that such horrors could occur again. ”

It has, and will happen again. That is the message of the Holocaust.
Look on and tremble.

felix1999
felix1999
5 years ago
Reply to  livingengine

Sensitivity training is a lead up to this stuff.
Remember Hillary wanted ADULT SUMMER CAMP with RED and BLUE cabins.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/christinerousselle/2015/03/19/hillary-clinton-pitches-summer-camp-for-adults-to-reduce-fun-deficit-n1973311

IzlamDownpressesHumanity
IzlamDownpressesHumanity
5 years ago
Reply to  livingengine

Perhaps a nuclear capable Israel might prevent such a recurrence.

CanadaGoose1
CanadaGoose1
5 years ago

Visited Krakow at the beginning of the summer. Couldn’t bring myself to visit Auschwitz, partly because it was too often promoted as a tourist attraction but mainly because I believed I would have nightmares ever after visiting. So hard to believe Jews are the object of so much hate still today.

poetcomic1
poetcomic1
5 years ago
Reply to  CanadaGoose1

I went there in the 1970’s on a winter day. I was practically the ONLY person in all of Birkenau (auschwitz II the extermination camp). They didn’t have all those ultra-modern memorials and ‘interpretive’ exhibits back then. One could still see black smears of human ashes around the pond behind the crematoria, a bent and blackened prisoner’s spoon lay on the ground where it had fallen. Never knew such a silence.

Sarsour Cyanidal
Sarsour Cyanidal
5 years ago
Reply to  poetcomic1

You have written an extraordinary post. I was there in 1990 and the cleanup had begun.

poetcomic1
poetcomic1
5 years ago

I hate to even notice it but do they use the words JEW or JEWISH once in this entire film?

Alleged-Comment
Alleged-Comment
5 years ago

This is more of a documentary. Yet, it is prophesied to happen again. This time to Britain, America, Australia, Canada, the West in general and even Israel. Even worse than you could imagine in WW II.

It’s called the tribulation. Jacob’s trouble.

One organization believes it will come from – yes, Germany, as they started all wars. Israel should have never bought their subs from Germany. How could they after this??

I don’t know what all these Moslem immigration into the West means? But it must be significant in prophesy since we are living in the end of the end-times.

This is what happens when they disarm you. When you surrender. When you get too lazy and trusting. Something the West is doing right now.

You’ll be ruled by the exterminators. Demon possessed men and women. The losers who now see themselves fit to carry out their revenge on society. Payback time.

When the SHTF Demoncraps will be the frist to put on their Nutzi uniforms.

satcatchet
satcatchet
5 years ago

Perhaps the scurge of the Earth is polluting the planet in order to help bring in the Anti Christ and bare his number, 666. No number, no buy, sell or trading so you perish. If you don’t except the number, you better have your soul in Gods’ hand so you may escape His wrath. Remember the Great Flood? Those naysayers perished. God saved the believers. Where do you want to go for the rest of your eternal life, in the smoking section or nonsmoking section. Let this 30 minute film, Night and Fog help you in your decision-making.

joanofark06
joanofark06
5 years ago

I’ve made this comment before, many times. Maybe you’ve see it already? I had this thought quite a while back, and I still believe it.
I believe satan will be a physical person, during the Tribulation. With that in mind, he won’t be able to be in more than one place at a time, so he will need many followers, to help him exterminate (around the world), the ones who WILL NOT take his mark. (The christians and jews, and possibly others)
Now who else hates the christians, and jews, as much as satan does? Well, those are the one’s, that are being immigrated, by the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, to all these MANY non-muslim countries, where the leaders have all one mind-set to happily bring them in to their borders. (How can so many leaders not know about the muslims faith, their koran, and the many verses, to kill anyone that doesn’t believe as they do?) So satan takes control of all these leaders minds, and has his followers, walk right into these countries, to live.
Why? He’ll need his followers to exterminate the christians and jews in these countries (He already has his followers, in the many other muslim countries). So what is the punishment for not taking his mark? It’s in Rev 20:4, but it’s also in the koran, as “strike the necks”, which his followers, will be happy to do!
Here is the list of non-muslim countries, where many christians and jews live, and have lived, for years, but now, thousands of “followers of evil”, have been immigrated to. This list is shocking of how many leaders have welcomed these “followers of satan”, into their borders, by the thousands. How can this many leaders, have the same mind-set, to do this? To bring in haters and killers, of christians and jews?

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Brussels, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany,, Greece, Holland, Iceland, Ireland (rumor has it, they want a million of them, by 2040), Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland…

Alleged-Comment
Alleged-Comment
5 years ago
Reply to  joanofark06

Oh yes, the politicians are well AWARE who these Moslems are. OPPOSERS of Christianity like they are and their father SATAN!

The Bible speak of a beheading of Christians. And we all know Moslems LOVE to behead people.

poetcomic1
poetcomic1
5 years ago

Half of Israeli Jews have another ‘victim card’ they are or are the children of those who fled pogrom, mass expulsion and terror against them in Muslim lands to live in their own land as ‘full human beings’ and not ‘dhimmis’. They are living in the tiny piece of land that the KORAN even declares belongs to them.

Achmed Mohandjob
Achmed Mohandjob
5 years ago
Reply to  poetcomic1

Did you notice how our little moslem simply ran away, when faced with facts? Poor little dear, it’s really not her fault …. It’s her breeding.

Achmed Mohandjob
Achmed Mohandjob
5 years ago

Gaza is one of the world’s larger zoos, filled with the descendants of the cross-breeding of monkeys with pigs (moslems).

satcatchet
satcatchet
5 years ago

Sad and forever gripping at the living souls. What say you holocaust deniers?

MajorTom
MajorTom
5 years ago

No words can describe this holocaust fully……..
“The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9.

‘Political Islam’ reports that since Mohammed, at least 270 million souls have been killed in the name of Allah.

‘Death by Gun Control….The Human Cost of Victim Disarmament’ by Aaron Zelman and Richard W. Stevens report that approximately 90 million souls were taken…’The Human Cost of Gun Control Ideas!’

The storm warning is over……the breakers are smashing on the rocks……………..

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