NIGHT AND FOG: SUDDEN SIGHTS, ENDLESS CRIES
Brechtian alienation in Alain Resnais' seminal masterpiece.
The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!" When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.
When sufferings become unendurable, the the cries are no longer heard.
The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.
BERTOLT BRECHT
Diogenes still remembers, vividly, a film screening he attended back in the mid 1960’s when he was an undergraduate at Columbia. It was a double bill. The first feature was Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will – two hours of ecstatic propaganda glorifying Adolf Hitler. Leni constructed an overwhelming vision of Der Führer’s vision. Tens – hundreds -- of thousands of eager, Nazis all Sieging, all Heiling, toward a single demigod on the podium. Orgasmic rapture in an all-male, homoerotic, Nuremburg rally for the ages.
The effect was stupefying.
The second feature was only 33 minutes long. Alan Resnais’ Night and Fog.
The effect was stupefying.
Although Diogenes had seen grainy concentration camp footage of the camps before, he had never experienced so powerful an account, one that not only chilled Triumph, but brought 1965 into synchrony with 1945, and with 1955. The New Yorker film critic Richard Braudy called it half-hour that changed modern consciousness. It certainly changed mine.
The film can be viewed on The Criterion Channel or on YouTube.
Night and Fog -- Nuit et Brouilard – was made in 1955 – ten years after the liberation of the konzentrationslager. Unlike Shoah (nine hours), The Sorrow and the Pity (four hours), Schindler’s List (three hours), and so many other epic documentary and fictional accounts of the Holocaust that were to follow, Night and Fog is brief and fragmented.
WHAT WE SEE – AND DON’T SEE
ALAIN RESNAIS
Resnais’ technique deliberately breaks the visual experience into two segments. There is the black and white narrative -- the rise of the Nazis, the decision to create the extermination camps, the reality of those camps, and the 1945 liberation – all from Nazi and Allied archive footage, all in black and white.
Intercut is haunting color footage tracking through the empty ruins of the camps as they were in 1955 – deserted, mute, eerily serine, timeless. There are no people, no guards, no kapos, no victims. There are no monuments of the sort that would be constructed later to demand NEVER AGAIN. There are no mourners, no tourists, no pilgrims. We drift alone through remnants of a forgotten time and place under the indifferent Autumn sky.
Even a peaceful landscape, even a meadow in harvest with flights of crows and grass fires; even a road for cars and peasants and couples, even a resort village with marketplace and steeple, can lead to a concentration camp.
Nuit et Brouillard is a time-travel movie – from now to then and back to now. . . (Resnais’ assistant director, Chris Marker, would go on to make La Jetée, the seminal time travel movie.)
The director edited the film himself. The continuity is contrapuntal: black-and-white, mostly still images from the camps juxtaposed with color tracking shots of contemporary 1955 Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Night and Fog again and again from postcard colors of a postwar tourist world to the black-and-white staring eyes, the barely stirring skeletons, the line-ups of the naked, and the ovens, give the film a greater impact than any other such film had achieved .
Eric Barnouw: Documentary: a history of the non-fiction film
What is absent from this documentation is as important as what is included. There are no overarching villains. We barely see Hitler, Himmler, Höess. The movie omits Darth-Vader like Nazi soldiers. The evildoers are mostly anonymous, unnamed. There are no developed heroic characters – no Sophies or Schindlers, No Anne Franks, no boys in pajamas. We know nothing about the victims except their presence in the camps, as numbers as faces, as corpses, as castrati, as bolts of cloth.
Controversially absent from the film is any categorization of the victims – Jewish, Romish, political prisoners, homosexuals, the mentally ill. The voice-over deliberately avoids citation of identity. There are no statistics – how many millions of Jews or hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, and so forth. Yes, we see the yellow stars sown on the striped uniforms, but the overall impression is that of anonymity — homogeneity — the processes of dehumanization enforced on the exterminated.
Nuit et Brouillard does not speak the words antisémetisme or solution finale.
The name of the film itself contains an inner irony.
The "Night and Fog" decree was directed against persons in occupied territories engaging in activities intended to undermine the security of German troops. They were, upon capture, to be brought to Germany "by night and fog" for trial by special courts. This circumvented military procedure and various conventions governing the treatment of prisoners. The code name stemmed from Germany's most acclaimed poet and playwright, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who used the phrase to describe clandestine actions often concealed by fog and the darkness of night.
FILMIC ALIENATION
What we experience in this movie – that Francois Truffaut called the greatest film ever made – is not a traditional documentary (whatever that is) nor a conventional drama. If it can be categorized at all, we should look to Bertolt Brecht.
Resnais applies Brechtian verfremsdungeffekt -- alienation technique to the cinema, forcing his audiences out of their comfort zones, not allowing them the traditional elements of drama and documentary – characters, climaxes, suspense, certainty, continuity, the (supposedly) objective point of view we expect.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights, and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
Bertolt Brecht
Temporal dissonance – past and present. Contemporary color tracking shots collide with shocking images from the past.
We amble past the ruins. We walk along the railroad tracks and wander into the dormitories – empty now. We are safe in a leisurely drive on a beautiful day among the ruins of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
No footstep is heard but our own.
And then, abruptly, we imagine ourselves inside a death camp. Not necessarily Auschwitz, but any of hundreds named and unnamed. The archival footage is not specific. The victims could be anywhere – and, perhaps more trenchant, they could be anyone. They could be you. They could be someone known to you.
What we experience in both the images from the past and the present are two different types of intimacy. The color sequences are first-person POV. We see the places through our own eyes, mostly at a leisurely pace, legato, in long tracking shots.
The black and white footage is sudden, unsparing. We dwell in the barracks, we observe the latrines, the medical laboratories, we hear the orchestra playing as we return from our labor. We see the faces, the scars, the genitalia. We peer directly into the eyes of those about to be exterminated. We even enter the gas chambers and see the shower heads. We look up at the ceiling and see scratches. We see the ovens.
Nothing distinguishes the gas chambers from any ordinary block house. What looks like the shower room awaits the arrivals. The doors were closed... A watch was kept...
The only sign that you have to know is the ceiling...scored byfingernails. Even the concrete was torn.
When the incinerator proved inadequate, pyres were installed. Yet the new ovens coped with thousands of bodies per day. Nothing is lost...
Even the visits of the Commandant and the high ranking Nazi officials – from Himmler himself -- are witnessed from the inmate’s point of view. But what we learn from these visits is that the camps serve a purpose. They are factories run not just to exterminate, but to recycle – ash, bones, hair, teeth. Huddled raw material in, shipped in boxcars, stored piled in barracks, stripped naked, processed -- heinous product out. The blueprints and lists of prisoners are the documents – blueprints, lists, tattoos, that meticulously document the process.
A visit from Himmler. Destruction but productivity.
Leaving the production aspect to others, Himmler concentrateson the destruction. Plans...
Models are studied...are carried out...the deportees doing the work. The incinerator could be made to look like a picture postcard.
Toward the end, we see the piles of corpses, the eyeglasses, the hair, rolls of fabric made from that hair. Individual identities no longer exist. Bodies are bulldozed into pits like landfill. The dehumanization is complete.
We are jerked between realties – simultaneously distanced and conjoined. There is no place in the for a pause – for silence. The brusque alternation conveys urgency. Ironically, it’s the black and white images that seem to belong to the present and the color images that are timeless, drifting – out of the past.
Resnais does not conceal the filmmaking process. He deliberately interferes with continuity, juxtaposing film stocks, rhythms, alternating tranquility with mayhem, sometimes blending past with present. The editing disrupts our sense of time.
The opposition is reinforced by the rhythm of the editing. Sylvie Lindeperg’s full history of the film, titled simply Night and Fog, tells us, “The average length of a color shot is just under twenty seconds, and of a black-and-white shot, four-and-a-half seconds. This means that one color shot lasts on average as long as five black-and-white shots.” Contrasting Sun and Shadow—beauty that we contemplate at our ease—with Night and Fog, where one horrifying image is piled on another at a staccato speed that denies easeful contemplation, the film leaves us with the haunting question of what links those two worlds.
Colin McCabe: Night and Fog: The Never-Ending cries.
Night and Fog is not telling a story. It is making us tell the story to ourselves. Jolted between past and present, we confront the crucial question – Where are we?
Haunting faces of individuals. Then, a bureaucratic process that obliterates their individuality. Signal moments of anguish. Then, factories that process that anguish into mass-produced product. We experience contradiction, estrangement, even desperation.
We must put the pieces together ourselves. Night and Fog will not do it for us.
In his theatrical productions, Brecht used alienation techniques, to break up continuity. He refused to use period costumes or realistic sets. He broke up his narrative with constant interruptions from the present – signs, narrators, direct encounter with the audience – to remind us of our presence in the theatre. In the here and now, not once upon a time.
AURAL ALIENATION
The aural dimension of Nuit et Brouillard -- the voiceover of the narrator, Michel Bouquet speaking the words of poet and KZ Mauthausen survivor Jean Kayrol, combine with the musical score composed by Hans Essler combine to further alienate the imagery.
JEAN KAYROL
Bouquet’s bland, flat, matter-of-fact delivery of the Kayrol narration deliberately drains the Voice of Authority present in most documentaries.
The Essler score is often lyrical while the horror we see is anything but. As Resnais himself said the more violent the images, the gentler the music.
As the abomination of the visual images becomes unbearable – corpses on a crematory woodpile, decapitated heads in a bucket, tattooed pieces of skin -- chirpy woodwinds seem to mock them. Or perhaps attempt to soothe us. Pizzicato for the final horrors. The music gives new meaning to the word obscene.
The voice-over narrative for Nuit et Brouillard was written by the poet Jean Cayrol – a survivor of KZ Mauthausen. Resnais refused to make the picture unless Cayrol wrote the script. The screenplay has the impossible task of speaking the unspeakable. Like the music it is a work of art in itself. Here is a link to its entirety.
The speaker, Michel Bouquet, avoids melodrama and sentiment. He adapts a matter-of-fact tone for most of the way – again, an alienation effect. In an introduction to the Criterion version of the film the critic Phillip Lopate points out:
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”).
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/288-night-and-fog
CONCLUDING INTERROGATORY
At the very end, the tone breaks. Because of the restraint shown for most of the delivery, the final words, spoken in direct address, haunt us – haunt me, until this day.
When the Allies open the doors, All the doors,..
Deportees look on without understanding. Are they free?
Will life know them again?
"I am not responsible," says the Kapo.
"I am not responsible," says the Officer.
The skill of the Nazis is child's play today. 9,000,000 dead haunt this landscape. Who is on the lookout from the strange watchtowers to warn us of our new executioner's arrival?
Are their faces really different from ours?
There are those who look upon these ruins today, as though the monster were dead and buried beneath them. Those who take hope again as the images fade, as though there were a cure for the scourge of all those camps. Those who opined it happened only once. Those who have at a certain time and a certain place... Those that refuse to look around them... Deaf to the endless cry.
Alors, qui est responsible?
This question reverberates into the present – into each and every time Night and Fog is projected onto a contemporary screen. In 1955, when the film was released in France, the endless cry was heard coming from a certain time and a certain place – the French colony of Algeria NOW.
In 1965, when Diogenes first viewed the film, the question reverberated from the American war in Vietnam NOW. Were the hands we saw torching huts with Zippo lighters really different from ours?
In 1956, Cayrol said Memory of the past is only permanent when illuminated by the present.
Memories from the Nazi Nacht und Nebel -- nightmarish, obscene, unspeakable.
Never again?
Are the abhorrant images in Resnais’ film to be sealed in a memory vault? Are we to remember – or rather Never Forget – these atrocities by visiting holocaust museums or by seeing actors whom we recognize play victims or oppressors in a Steven Spielberg melodrama? Are we to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau and take the guided tour? Are we, in one way or another, to say that the Holocaust belongs only to one group of victims in a single, unrepeatable time?
Are the cries that emerged from the KZ lagers truly endless? And are we still deaf to them? Even after we all have seen the movies and visited the museums?
There are those who look upon these ruins today, as though the monster were dead and buried beneath them. Those who take hope again as the images fade, as though there were a cure for the scourge of all those camps. Those who opined it happened only once. Those who have at a certain time and a certain place...
Or are those images to be mingled with other images from the relentless present -- South Africa, Indonesia, Rwanda, Myanmar, Cambodia, Chechnya, Ukraine, Gaza, the US Southern border?
Where are we NOW?
In a subsequent essay, Diogenes will examine the radical alienation techniques employed by Johathan Glazer in his 2023 masterpiece – The Zone of Interest.
The Commandant's villa is near the camp. His wife and children...
She entertains like in any other garrison town.
The war seems distant - not to end. Perhaps she seems bored.
Diogenes
9 April 2024
A stellar post, Diogenes. I will share widely.