Nuit et brouillard
Alain Resnais (1955)
In Sight and Sound’s 2014 ‘greatest ever documentary’ poll of critics and film-makers, two films concerning the German Holocaust featured in the top ten. In second place was Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which runs some nine hours[1]. In fourth place was Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, which lasts thirty-two minutes. Resnais’s documentary short, made to mark the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, alternates between contemporary colour film of the now-deserted Auschwitz and Majdanek camps, and black-and-white footage and still photographs of what went on in them and in other camps in the early 1940s. The narration is by Michel Bouquet, who reads a script by Jean Cayrol. The images and words are accompanied by an orchestral score, composed by Hanns Eisler and conducted by Georges Delerue.
Here is another venerable piece of cinema which a first-time viewer today struggles to see for what it was originally. In the case of Night and Fog, I was carrying in my mind not only films made subsequently but also, indeed especially, one that technically predated Resnais’s, though it’s only recently seen the light of day – Sidney Bernstein’s German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, put together in the weeks immediately following the liberation of the camps in 1945. Compared with the Bernstein film, Night and Fog is a work of art yet I found its artistry problematic. It’s hard to say this when Jean Cayrol, a member of the French Resistance, was himself a survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen camp. (The film takes its name from Cayrol’s 1946 collection Poèmes de la nuit et brouillard; the title connotes also the Nazi Nacht und Nebel directive of 1941.) In an interview with the International Herald Tribune in 2006, Alain Resnais explained that, while editing Night and Fog, he ‘had scruples, knowing that making the film more beautiful would make it more moving’. The film didn’t have this effect on me: the music by Hanns Eisler (who became an exile when the Nazis came to power and emigrated to the US in 1938) is sensitive and melodiously elegiac – I found these qualities discordant with the terrible pictures on screen. Michel Bouquet reads with care and skill but the scathing, elegant wit of Cayrol’s text sometimes presents dramatising opportunities that it’s impossible for an actor-narrator to resist. The images from the concentration camps are such that they need to speak for themselves. Anything more than a ‘factual survey’ is over-interpretation, runs the risk of misrepresentation.
Like Sidney Bernstein’s film, Night and Fog proceeds from exposure and condemnation of what happened in the Nazi camps to urging vigilance against letting something like it happen again. There’s no denying the importance of Resnais’s film as a contribution to what Philip French described in his piece on it in Sight and Sound in September 2014 as ‘this most challenging of topics’. It’s important to mention one other feature of the film, however. In sixth place in last year’s S&S documentary poll was Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer, which Richard Brody in 2013 called ‘the primordial … Holocaust film’, noting that Night and Fog:
‘… is about the concentration camps but doesn’t include any individual’s experience or testimony, and it mentions the word “Jewish” only once, in the course of a litany of persecutions by the Nazi regime.’
Although the lack of emphasis on the anti-Semitic focus of the Nazi genocide is less stark than this suggests (there are people on the screen identifiable as Jews through the light-coloured star they wear), the single reference in the script is startling. Mention is made of a ‘Jewish student’ among those deported to the camps; as Brody says, the student is one item in a list and his ethnicity is mentioned to stress the range of victims of the Nazis. I don’t know if this downplaying of the Shoah is connected with the fact that Jean Cayrol wasn’t a Jew but it goes a long way to explaining the largely negative reception in 1950s Israel of Night and Fog.
25 August 2015
[1] Wikipedia gives four different running times for four different countries, ranging from 503 minutes in the US to 613 minutes in France.
