mf@cornell.UUCP (mf) (05/02/85)
``Night and Fog'' (``Nuit et brouillard,'' 1955) is still the most powerful
film on the concentration camp experience.
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 the ``terrible gentleness'' of its tone.
[Francois Truffaut]
Far more than a work of art, it is a poignant testimony against ``a
system which did not respect the elementary rights of everyone to his own ori-
ginality and particularity,'' not only about a fact of dead history, but an
evidence of an ever-present reality. It is a film on despair and hope, a very
topical warning to all of those who did not believe then and want to forget
today, to those who look at the serene and pastoral ruins sincerely believing
that they signify the death of a plague rather than the birth of a new evil
and ``who pretend to believe that all this is of one time and one country and
who do not hear that people cry unceasingly.''
The title
``Night and Fog'' is not merely a poetic metaphor for the murkiness of
concentration camps, for it names a specific category of Nazi concentration
camp inmates, the ``Nacht und Nebel'' prisoners.
The term was coined by the infamous Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS,
who took it from Wagner's ``Rheingold'' (1853), where it refers to the dwarf
Alberich (the character with whom Himmler identified) and his theft of the
Rhine maiden's gold. Assisted by his cretinous brother Mime, Alberich now
succeeds in forging a magical helmet allowing its wearer to assume whatever
shape he desires, says a magic incantation:
Night and Fog --
No one remains as he was!
and is then transformed into a cloud of mist and fog and becomes invisible.
A ``night and fog'' prisoner was made to ``disappear'' and was never
confronted with his ``crime'' in a court of law.
A Film of Contrasts
``Night and Fog'' opens with color shots of a peaceful landscape,
Auschwitz today, whose present calm seems to deny its past devils. Soon, it
gives way to harsh images of sealed freight cars and barbed wire; stills of
Himmler visiting the camp and examining the plans for the machinery of annihi-
lation; back to the present, the innocuous look of ``picture-postcard'' crema-
toria, a tourist attraction; black-and-white archival footage of long columns
of prisoners, selected, stripped, humiliated, tatooed and numbered, walking
skeletons led powerless to their imminent death; a visit to a gas chamber
today, whose fingernail-scratched concrete on the ceiling screams eternally.
In the end, all that is left are ashes and bodies, relics of an insane
attempt to make clothes and soap from human bodies, a generation of survivors
incapable of understanding and those who would deny them even their memories.
The spoken commentary takes into account the audience's predictable
difficulty at seeing such horror. The voice lets the images speak for them-
selves, at times quietly recalling, probing, offering statistics and bearing
witness, all with an admirable lack of emotionalism. Nor does the music mani-
pulate, but rather shows that the optimism and hope of man always exist in the
background.
Resnais, Cayrol and Eisler
Alain Resnais was born in 1922 in France. His tastes for literature
(Proust, Aldous Huxley, Mansfield), theater (Tchekhov) and cinema developed
very early. After attending a Catholic high-school, he studied acting for two
years at the Cours Simon, and later at the I.D.H.E.C., a school for film direc-
tors. After WWII, he shot his first important films -- ``Gauguin,'' with
music by Darius Milhaud; ``Guernica,'' on a text by Paul Eluard. In 1955, he
was commissioned to compile a film on the concentration camps. ``I accepted
only on the condition that the commentary be written by Jean Cayrol because he
himself was a survivor.''
Jean Cayrol, born in Bordeaux in 1917 and whose brother Pierre was
murdered in Oranienburg, was active in the French Resistance, and deported to
Mathausen concentration camp, where he became himself a Night and Fog prisoner
from 1942 until 1945. After his liberation, he commemorated his own experi-
ences by writing ``Poems of Night and Fog.''
Hanns Eisler, a German composer and former associate of Brecht driven
from his homeland by the advent of Hitler, composed the music to the film.