Viewing memory through Night and Fog, The Sorrow and the Pity and Shoah.

Between 1955 and 1983, three French film documentaries displaced our understanding of the events of World War II: Nuit et brouillard by Alain Resnais, Le Chagrin et la pitie by Marcel Ophuls and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. These are films that reveal specific moments in France's difficult path to assessing the events of the "dark years'. As markers of changes in the political, social and cultural attitude of France's views of the war and Vichy, these films offer probing historical evidence of France's struggles with its past, as well as compelling archival materials on the deportations, the occupation and the Holocaust. But, in addition, they also present us with exceptional illustrations of the vicissitudes of recollections, the unpredictable workings of memory, and the vicarious effects of visual and oral testimonies. They in turn testify to a contemporary cultural event: the displacement of traditional history in favour of testimony.

Keywords: Le Chagrin et la pitie, memory, Nuit et brouillard, Shoah, World War II

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'Pourquoi faut-il que l'historicite soit toujours pensee comme oubli?' Michel Foucault, March 1963 (2001: 31)

Between 1955 and 1985, three French films: Alain Resnais' Nuit et brouillard, Marcel Ophuls's Le Chagrin et la pitid and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah were each hailed, when they were first viewed, as unsurpassed masterpieces: works that changed our understanding of past events. There have been many very good films dealing with World War II, but the status of these three films remains unchanged; they are still considered works of superior reach. Nuit et brouillard and Shoah both focus on the concentration camps of World War II, while Le Chagrin et la pitie investigates life in the city of Clermont-Ferrand under the German occupation. My intention is not to examine these films as documentary evidence of discrete aspects of the war, but to study them in their specificity as testimonial evidence of France's conflicted relationship to the events of the war, and in their intertextuality as factual indication of cultural changes in our approach to history. In other words my purpose is to view these films as documentary confirmation of the workings of cultural memory. Each of these films marks a specific moment in France's difficult path to assessing the events of the 'dark years'. Compared with one another, they chart subtle changes in the political, social and cultural attitudes towards the war years. But in addition to the facts investigated, these films also present us with exceptional illustrations of the vicissitudes of recollections, the unpredictable workings of memory, and the vicarious effects of visual and oral testimonies.

Alain Resnais' film takes its title from the 7 December 1941 decree of the Fuehrer called the Nacht-und-Nebel Erlass whereby, within the territories occupied by the Germans, people considered hostile to the Third Reich, most particularly communists, but others as well, could be arrested, deported and ultimately killed (Night-and-Fog Decree, 1). Commissioned by the Comite d'Histoire de la Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale, Nuit et brouillard is a short, thirty-two minute documentary on the concentration camps ten years after their liberation. The film starts in colour on the grounds of a concentration camp as it appears at the moment of the filming. The present is shown in colour, but in the course of the film the past is evoked through clips of black-and-white newsreels, photographs and selections from films taken by the liberators. These newsreels, photographs and other visual documents were found in the war archives of France, Poland and the Netherlands. Resnais thus includes in Nuit et brouillard clips of films taken by the British, the Americans and the Russians at the liberation respectively of Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Until Resnais' film, these visual documents had not been released publicly. The first viewing of Nuit et brouillard was then for almost all spectators an initial confrontation with the visual proof of the enormity of the horrors of the deportations and the genocide. Nuit et brouillard starts in the present, in colour, the camera slowly moving across a bucolic landscape under a blue sky filled with fluffy clouds to the accompaniment of a musical score; then fences of barbed wire appear in front of the landscape. The narrator comments that this is a 'peaceful landscape ... an ordinary road ... an ordinary village'. The names of Struthof, Oranienburg, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Belsen, Ravensbruck and Dachau, the narrator reminds us, were 'names like any others on maps and in guidebooks'. The filming of the barbed wires is interrupted to show black-and-white clips of Nazi soldiers marching, Hitler making a speech, etc., to evoke 1933 when, as the narrator tells us, 'the machine gets underway'. Then the camera shows us wooden watchtowers with different roofs: sloping roofs, slanted roofs, flat roofs while the voice says: 'Any style will do. It's left to the imagination: Swiss style, garage style, Japanese style, no style at all.' As the camera slowly films the buildings at the entrance to a camp, the voice-off of the narrator tells us that 'Meanwhile, Burger, a German Communist; Stern a Jewish student from Amsterdam; Schmulszki, a merchant in Cracow; Annette, a schoolgirl in Bordeaux. All go on living their everyday lives, not knowing that there is a place, a thousand miles away, already awaiting them.'

The screenplay written by Jean Cayrol, himself a former inmate at Mauthausen, explains, and also comments on, the visual narrative of the film by orally projecting the not-yet-accomplished future of these individuals into the past evoked by the film. Resnais now brings forth footage of newsreel showing gatherings of men, women and children, streets packed with people bearing the Star of David on their coats being herded by soldiers. Later in the film we will see the horrific and unforgettable images of the packed trains, the dead on arrival, the filled barracks, the mountains of hair and glasses, the skeletal bodies of men standing naked, the calcinated bodies of those who were burned, heaps of bodies pushed into a mass grave by a bulldozer. The visual documentation is overwhelming. We are shown rolls of cloth made of human hair, soap made of human remains, lampshades made of human skin. In a short half-hour, Resnais' Nuit et brouillard deploys for all to see the unimaginable record of human atrocities perpetrated on millions of unarmed civilians shipped like cattle from all over Europe to fuel the hubris of Nazi ideology. According to the video jacket, when it was released Francois Truffaut called it ...