Night and Fog- DVD Review
July 4, 2003
In 1955, commissioned by a WWII historical board, French director Alain Resnais and two cameramen traveled to the remains of the Auschwitz concentration camp site to shoot B-roll footage for a short documentary film. There they encountered a ghost of a once burgeoning “city”, a place where the Nazi’s systematically enslaved, starved, tortured and slaughtered millions of ethnic Jews. The rubbles of the crematorium smoke stacks, the overgrown weeds, the ever-present train tracks and the juiceless electrical wires- Resnais and his two skilled cinematographers (Ghislain Cloquet and Sacha Vierny) filmed it all, in soft color and long tracking shots. Resnais would personally edit the shot film and contrast it with black and white stock footage from 1942-45 into “Night and Fog”, a landmark documentary that has finally been released on DVD.
Ten years after the war, “Night and Fog” was groundbreaking, a 30-minute essay solely about the horrific experiences underwent by the prisoners inside the monstrous camps. No film up to that period had so chillingly shown what went on behind those tall electric fences and inside those many long, brick buildings; dormitories of dingy latrines, gas “showers”, hospital rooms primarily used for experimentation and mutilation, and rows of hard, overcrowded wooden beds. In a mere 30 minutes Resnais summed up the overwhelming experience and made it clear to anyone (and there were many) who didn’t want to believe it all happened that it indeed did, and could happen again.
“Night and Fog” is, in a way, both a conventional and radical example of the short documentary film. Conventional in the way it presents facts and images to tell the story of the camps, primarily Auschwitz, and how they were run like an efficient factory whose motives are torture and death. Unconventional in the way it uses overhead narration as a commentary on post-war society and the way it seamlessly blended black and white with color photography. Resnais brought on noted essayist and novelist Jean Cayrol, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, to write a detailed, yet poetic script to the 30-minute project. It is appropriate that The Criterion Collection, producers of the new DVD, opted not to record a running commentary as Cayrol’s narration is on its own a biting and elegiac commentary track.
Cayrol provided the words to accompany Resnais images. “A strange grass now covers the land where the inmates once trod,” he introduced in an early tracking shot of the wasted camp that sets the meaning of the film in motion. Over the next half hour we will see footage of the present, decaying and abandoned camp mixed with the story of its construction (“they were built like any normal deal, with business men, architects and more than a few bribes”), inhabitation, machinations and eventual abandonment. Which eventually left the Allies to open the gates to a sight of unforgiving inhumanity and prompted those caught to repeat, during the Nuremberg Trials, “I am not responsible”. “Then who is responsible?” questions the narrator, in one of the films many uses of philosophic digressions that normal, by-the-books documentaries wouldn’t dare put forth.
Most Holocaust documentaries we’ve been shown, in school classrooms for instance, wanted to see the atrocities without looking deeper but Resnais’ film looks and never flinches and the images are terrifying and unforgettable. Still photography plays a major role in the overall effect, such as in a graphic shot of six decapitated bodies lying in a perfect line, their heads in a wicker basket to the left. Or in a striking photograph taken at what seems like the very second of death as an emaciated man stares, with huge white globes, at the camera as Cayrol’s narration speaks of “a body of indeterminable age that dies with its eyes open.”
Similar in effect is the old newsreel footage. One scene shows the kind of ratio the Nazi’s were killing at as a bulldozer dumps literally hundreds of bodies into a huge, open grave. We learn that, before burial, the Kapo’s and SS men would pillage the bodies; use the skin for paper, hair for cloth, bones for soap and fertilizer. They would save everything (shoes, glasses, shaving brushes) in immense piles stored in vast empty warehouses. Not only were the Nazi’s stealing the lives and livelihood of their captives, they used their willpower and belongings as a kind of economic factor. Had they won the war, suggests Cayrol, the concentration camps may have been a major structure in the make-up of Germany’s economy.
One of the reasons “Night and Fog” is so powerful is the symbolism presented in the contrasting periods. The abandoned, decaying buildings are used to suggest the way the inmates themselves were left to visibly waste away. One sequence, with shots from Leni Riefenstahl’s propagandistic “Triumph of Will” (’35), of Nazi legs marching in unison, oddly resembles the careful tracking shots inside the latrines and oven chambers. A beautiful, yet disturbing night shot of an arriving train (in dense fog) is contrasted to a shot of the tracks overrun by grass and weeds. All of these counter shots are meant to be a way of saying that the war may be over, but that doesn’t mean it’s to be ignored, the remembrance and evidence is there in the crumbling walls of Auschwitz. “War nods off to sleep,” says Cayrol, “but keeps one eye always open.”
“Night and Fog” was made by a team of people whose names would become big in the scope of film history. After the acclaim showered on “Night and Fog”, director Alain Resnais would next make a feature length film also about remembrance of the war, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, which to many was the sounding bell of the French New Wave. His two cinematographers, Clouqet and Vierny would be responsible for some strikingly photographed films ranging from Woody Allen’s “Love and Death” to Luis Bunuel’s “Belle de jour”. Serving as assistant director was Chris Marker, an important figure in short, experimental filmmaking and travelogues. The films brilliant orchestral score (by German Hanns Eisler) was personally conducted by George Delerue, who would go on to provide the jazzy beat for the new wave.
With all that talent the film was an instant landmark and can be seen as an influence on directors such as Roberto Benigni (“Life is Beautiful”), Claude Lanzmann (“Shoa”), and significantly Steven Spielberg for “Schindler’s List”. Where Resnais had actual footage, Spielberg built his look and they are nearly identical; many probably don’t realize how indebted his great, deeply personal Oscar-winner is to a little French documentary from 1955.
The title, “Night and Fog” comes from a marking the Nazi’s forced on their captives, patches that represented “Night” or “Fog”. They were categories that ran in twos, like when the doomed souls stepped off of the trains; some went right, to the crowded wooden beds, and others went left, destined straight for the gas showers, never to spend a night inside the concrete prisons. The patches, like the number tattoos, were an example of the constant humiliation the imprisoned felt at the hands of their captors.
Ultimately, the documentary’s damning nail comes near the end when it suggests how society of the time may have turned a blind eye and deaf ear to “humanities cries”. What Resnais made was a film that set out to open those eyes and tune in those ears. Any high school teacher who has scheduled his students to watch “Schindler’s List” or to read “Night” should first show “Night and Fog”; it’s essential and still stands as one of the best pure examples of the cruelty of Nazism and the unbearable loss suffered as a result of the Holocaust.
“Night and Fog” has been released on DVD by The Criterion Collection with a short interview with Alain Resnais and production biographies.
by Adam Suraf