Night and Fog (film)
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| Night and Fog | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Alain Resnais |
| Produced by | Anatole Dauman |
| Written by | Jean Cayrol |
| Narrated by | Michel Bouquet |
| Music by | Hanns Eisler |
| Cinematography | Ghislain Cloquet Sacha Vierny |
| Editing by | Jasmine Chasney Henri Colpi |
| Release date(s) |  1955 |
| Running time | 32 min |
| Language | French |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Night and Fog (French: Nuit et brouillard) is a 1955 documentary film about the Nazi concentration camps.
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[edit] Production
The film was directed by Alain Resnais and written by Jean Cayrol, who had published a collection of poems, Poèmes de la nuit et brouillard(1945), which evoked his experience as a survivor of Mauthausen.
The film was commissioned by the Comité d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (a government commission assigned the tasks of assembling documentary material on and of launching historical inquiries and studies of the period of the French occupation, 1940-1945) and by the Réseau du souvenir (an association devoted to the memory of those deported to camps)at the instigation of the historians Henri Michel and Olga Wormser-Migot in the context of their work together in organizing an official exhibition (objects from which were subsequently used in the film) to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of France. The first public notice of their project was given during a radio broadcast on November 10, 1954, the opening day of the exhibition, among whose visitors was Anatole Dauman, originally from Warsaw, who undertook the production for Argos Films and arranged for co-financing by Films Polski, the Polish state production company.
During a pre-production meeting on May 28, 1955, during the course of which it was also decided "to explain clearly how the concentration-camp system (its economic aspect) flowed automatically from fascism", the film's provisional title, "Resistance and Deportation", was changed to "Night and Fog", a term applied to German Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) political prisoners during World War II, who were the victims of a decree promulgated by Himmler on December 7, 1941, that resistors to the reich arrested in their own countries would be deported to camps in such a way that they would vanish without a trace, thus disappearing into the "night and fog"; there is some irony in the title as "bei Nacht und Nebel dahon gehen" is a colloquial German expression, roughly meaning, "escape under cover of darkness". Hitler most likely borrowed the idiom from Wagner's Das Rheingold (1869), an opera that he revered, in which the dwarf Alberich, wearing his magic helmet, changes into a column of smoke and disappears while singing: « Night and fog, no longer anyone. » (« Nacht und Nebel, niemand gleich. »).
The title takes on yet another level of meaning when, roughly one-quarter into Resnais's film, Hanns Eisler's chilling score accompanying images of deportation is disrupted when the train arrives at Auschwitz. The narrator observes that during the train ride "la mort fait son premier choix [death makes its first choice]" and "un second est fait à l'arrivée dans la nuit et le brouillard [a second is made upon arrival in the night and fog]." The visuals cut to a shot of trains arriving in "the night and fog.", now become a metaphor for the mystery of their situation.
The film utilises a combination of: black-and-white still images from various archives; excerpts from older black-and-white films from French, Soviet, and Polish newsreels, from footage shot by detainees of the Westerbork internment camp in the Netherlands, and from footage shot by the Allies' "clear-up" operations; new colour and black-and-white footage recorded at concentration camps in 1955. These allow Resnais to contrasts the tranquility of several desolate post-war concentration camps(Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Struthof, Mathausen) with the horrific events that occurred there during World War II, muse on the diffusion of guilt, and pose the question of responsibility. The film also deals briefly with the prisoners' conditions, and shows disturbing footage of prisoners and dead victims in the camps.
[edit] Awards
[edit] See also
[edit] Further Reading
- Richard Raskin. "Alain Resnais's Nuit et Brouillard. On the Making, Reception and Functions of a Major Documentary Film. Including a New Interview with Alain Resnais and the Original Shooting Script. Foreword by Sascha Vierny." Aarhus University Press, 1987. ISBN 87-7288-100-3.
- Sylvie Lindeperg. "'Nuit et brouillard'un film dans l'histoire". Odile Jacob, 2007. ISBN 978-2-7381-1864-4.
[edit] External links
- Night and Fog at the Internet Movie Database
- Criterion Collection essay by Phillip Lopate
- Criterion Collection essay by Peter Cowie
- DVD review of film at Blogcritics
- Available online at Google
- http://parolesdesjours.free.fr/nuit.htm stills from the film
- http://www.diffusion.ens.fr/index.php?res=conf&idconf=1633 lecture in French by Sylvie Lindeperg
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