Analysis of Night and Fog - Movie Review Example

Analysis of Night and Fog When Night and Fog came out in 1955, the Holocaust was an entirely different historical perspective than the one from which we see it, almost sixty years later. In 1955, the Nuremberg Trials had only taken place nine years before; Israel had only been a nation for seven years. In 2014, the Holocaust is now enshrined in museums, and for the new generation it represents a series of artifacts, much like the tomb of King Tut or the catacombs of St. Peter’s. This does not mean that the Holocaust was not one of the most awful events in human history, but modern society does not have very many Holocaust survivors in their midst, as the vast majority of them have now passed away, and the cultural changes that the period between 1918 and 1945 wrought – what with the arrival of biological weapons, nuclear weapons, massive genocide and worldwide economic depression – are now a part of history. Night and Fog was an essay; later films like The Pianist and Schindler’s List were portraits. The difference is what makes Night and Fog such a powerful film, even six decades later. When people criticize Holocaust films, they tend to point at the movie’s exploitation of the sorrow and outrage within the audience for the purposes of commercialization. The argument is that it is impossible to simulate, in a two- to three-hour film, the true experience of the Holocaust, and so the end result is more of a mushy melodrama than an actual representation of the horrific truth. When Alain Resma was making Night and Fog, he was dealing with social wounds that were still quite fresh. Rather than try to make a film that spoke for the survivors, Resna choose a screenwriter (Jean Cayrol) who had actually lived in one. Also, neither director nor screenwriter attempted to give the audience an exhaustive overview of life behind those barbed wires. Instead, the narrative voiceover has the tone of doubt and skepticism all the way through. The repetition of phrases like “words are insufficient” and “it is useless to describe what went on” throughout the film shows a sympathy with the viewer, who may have either (or both) a conscious or unconscious resistance to accepting the images appearing on the screen. The question “Is it in vain that we try to remember?” is a particularly poignant one, given Russian president Vladimir Putin’s recent attempts to use anti-Semitism to stir up enough trouble in Ukraine to justify a Russian invasion, but it is important to remember that the lens of history was still very much under construction in 1955. While the viewer of Night and Fog receives a calm summary of the Nazis’ methods for exterminating the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other undesirables, the voiceover also indicates how impossible it is to process the information on the screen. This renders Night and Fog an anti-documentary, in fact. It is not possible to document a reality that is too awful to process. Instead, the approach that Resnais and Cayrol use is to have the viewer reflect, make inquiries, review the record and then ask questions of his own responses. This means that what the viewer has to look at is more of an essay than anything else. The fact that all of this subject matter is shoehorned into a mere thirty minutes means that the viewer is almost finished with the film before he has even had time to start processing the horrors of the beginning. Other Holocaust films, such as Schindler’s List (over three hours) and Shoah (over nine hours) have attempted to give their films a scope that fits their view of the Holocaust’s meaning more appropriately, but the fact is that the viewer can take as much out in a calmly shocking half-hour than he can after sitting for much longer. The almost ascetic form of reflection and analysis gives Night and Fog the ability to stay away from the rhetorical brier patch that sentimentality often provides. In addition to its skeptical text, the narrative voiceover comes through in a tone that is as arid and dry as the parched throats of many of the Holocaust victims themselves must have been. There are some ironic shadings, of course, but the tone is mostly neutral. The musical score is robustly written, but it comes across ironically with this film, as the beautiful flute solos play at the same time that the viewer is watching some of the film’s most horrific images. The pizzicato violin strings parallel the acceleration of the Nazi system. The visual elements of the film blend black and white photography with color to show the blending of the past and present. The stacks of women’s hair and the dug-up corpses are simply horrifying, even more so in their colorless stills and filmed footage. However, the modern footage of the same camps makes no effort to try and recreate that horror. Resnais’ approach appears to be to provide the most realistic contemporary representation of the camp. The color shots use tracking that is both probing and timid at once, as the camera goes slowly, looking for an unknown object or experience. There is a definite sense of brooding about the link between history and location, between building design and death. This brooding points out the ironic connection between the purposes of the buildings and the mundane approaches that went into their construction. There was a bid process, a host of contractors and a series of estimates – and even some bribery – that went into the design and construction of the worst horrors of Dachau, for example. This sort of distance allows the viewer to realize, with a bit of a shock, that different concentration camps featured different architectural styles. In fact, someone happening upon the buildings in the years after the camps closed, might actually find them attractive to look at from an architectural standpoint. One shot of a building in which the only sign of the horrors that had gone in within was the scratches on the ceiling, which people had used fingernails to try to break through. The statement “you have to know” from the narrator at this point has two different levels of meaning: if you didn’t have someone telling you, you wouldn’t know that the scratches were there or what they meant; also, now that you know what the scratches mean, there is no escape from that knowledge. The movements between the black and white footage with the color sections happen seamlessly, as one straight cut moves into another one without any intervening process shots, showing the quality of the editing at work. Resnais has an impressive resume as an editor, with such work as the shorts Guernica, All the Memory of the World and Van Gogh in his portfolio. All of these also focused on the junction between the preset and the past. The emphasis on memory in Night and Fog would return later on in Last Year at Marienbad and Providence. The most innovative aspect of this film is its introduction of the essay-movie genre. Modern viewers are almost too accustomed to this genre, thanks to the work of such filmmakers as Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore. However, the more modern practitioners of the form have abandoned the pretenses of neutrality and instead have used film to transform their own opinions into two-hour films. The most powerful element of Night and Fog is its strong anti-violence statement. There are some films that run with the “War is hell” theme, but the end product in those cases ends up like 300 or Henry V, glorifying war rather than making it look like the grindhouse that it actually is. It is only through reflection that one can understand the points at which history has turned into disaster, at which conflict no longer is a breeding ground of heroism but instead serves as a harbinger of the elements of human nature that will lead to its ultimate downfall. These elements include those slight fractures in the human ethos that allow for scapegoating and for turning a blind eye to the worst injustices, as long as they are not affecting oneself. It is not just people in Allied countries who had fresh memories of the Holocaust in 1955, and it is not just the survivors of the camps whose memories were still crawling with nightmares. The Germans who watched their Jewish neighbors get bullied out of their jobs, expelled from their schools and even rounded up and shipped away, never to be seen again, were complicit in the awful fate that awaited each of the inmates. Every viewer in the theater, then, is complicit in some way, because the fractures in human nature that opened to such yawning scale during the Holocaust appear within each of us. The choice, then, on the walk out of the theater, is not what to do about the Germans, or whether there is such thing as a proper way to atone for the Holocaust, but what each person is to do about the latent weaknesses within. Works Cited Night and Fog. Dr. Alain Resnais. Perf. Michel Bouquet, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmel. Argos Films, 1955. Film. Read More