Teaching Night and Fog: putting a documentary film in history.(Essay)

Night and Fog is the deportation seen and recounted by Christ.... Alain Resnais offers the left cheek and it is we who receive the slaps smack in the face, each shot being a well-deserved blow.--Francois Truffaut (1)

I have shown Night and Fog (1956), Alain Resnais's documentary film on the Nazi concentration camps, for twenty-five years in courses in modern European and modern world history. The film "presented the first graphic depiction of the working of the camps and of the techniques of mass murder used by the Nazis since the end of the first Nuremberg Trial in 1946." (2) It is a work of memory and of history and of the ambiguities and conflicts that the interplay of these entails. Spurred by the Network of Remembrance (Reseau du souvenir) in France, composed of deported resister survivors and the families of those who had died in the camps, and commissioned by the French republic's official Committee of the History of the Second World War to commemorate--to bring together in memory--the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, Night and Fog takes viewers on the journey to the camps when they were in operation and, in 1955, when the film was made. (3)

We see no footage of prisoners leaving the camps, because they never truly left behind the experience. Resnais suggests this will be true of the experience of viewing the camps for the audience of Night and Fog as well. Jean Cayrol, a Catholic poet and resister arrested in 1942 and sent to the M authausen camp in 1943, wrote the script for the film. At its release, he explained that Night and Fog is not a "chilled relic." Rather it is "a living witnessing," (4) in a meaning consonant with that given by those who witness for their faith: "The cloth [la toile] of the movie screen is not the cloth [le linge] of Veronica. [Night and Fog] is a film that burns the eyes." (5) Unlike the veil of Veronica, the film has no miraculous qualities: It can neither restore sight to the blind nor raise the dead. And it cannot convert unbelievers or get authorities to punish the guilty, as Veronica's veil convinced the emperor Tiberius of the divinity of Christ and to send Pilate into exile. But the film has been endowed with talismanic powers in France. After the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in France in 1990, the response of a horrified nation was to broadcast Night and Fog simultaneously on all French television channels.

The first time I showed the film was to a class in modern European history, following a lecture and reading on Nazi Germany. I was taken aback when two students left the room crying. I arranged to see each individually. The first told me she came from a family where anti-Semitic comments were made regularly and she felt complicit. The second was angry: "Why did you show this to me? I was a happier person before I saw it." Both students responded in ways I think Resnais and Cayrol would have understood and appreciated, recognizing that confrontation with the camp experience changes us in deeply painful ways. (6)

Knowing how individuals living in a time and place, and with their own understandings of the world and their own needs and interests, evoke the past, and how historically-situated audiences confront these evocations, is critical to students of history. When screening a documentary such as Night and Fog, I start by reminding students that, as with all works of history, documentaries are creative works. Resnais explained, "I've always refused the word 'memory' a propos of my work. I'd use the word 'imagination.'" (7) The point is not that Resnais made up anything about the camps. He insisted on working with a survivor--Cayrol--to try to assure this did not happen. But, in turn, Resnais knew that "memory" is not transferable; his aim was to make the unimaginable imaginable. A documentary of only 32 minutes, the running time for Night and Fog, involves many decisions about what to show and not to show, what to say and not to say. As a documentary, Night and Fog is composed of numerous documents drawn from a variety of sources. Why were these documents created--most not for the use Resnais makes them--and why does Resnais present them in the order he does? What interpretation is he offering viewers as we move in the film from the present to the past and back to the present, now charged with a knowledge and awareness we might have lacked before?

Let us start with the title. Night and Fog refers to a decree of December 7, 1941, mandating that resisters in western-occupied territories, whose cases could not be resolved immediately, would be deported. Cayrol tells us in Night and Fog that concentration camps had the qualities of "nocturnal stagings that so pleased the Nazis." (8) The designation Nacht und Nebel (NN) comes from Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold, in which Alberich recites a magical incantation to render himself invisible to his slaves in order to torment them. However, the Nazi decree was intended to avoid trials and make captured resisters disappear: NN prisoners were not allowed to receive mail; all requests for information on NN prisoners' location or survival were rejected. Keeping populations in occupied nations uninformed as to the fate of NN prisoners was seen as a way of controlling them. The very nebulous nature of the decree, the fact that NN prisoners often did not learn of their designation for some time and did not understand what NN meant, made it the site of morbid fantasizing during and after the war. However, NN did not refer to extermination; it concerned political prisoners, not those deported because of religion or ethnicity.

Cayrol had been an NN prisoner, but the vast majority of deportees were not. Why did Resnais and Cayrol choose the title Night and Fog for the film? Postwar France sought to repress confrontation with the extent of the Vichy regime's collaboration with Germany. (9) All French citizens had experienced hardship during the war and it was difficult for many of them not to resent camp survivors for trumping their own tales of deprivation and loss. The concern of deportees and the historians with whom they worked on Night and Fog was that the experience of the camps would be forgotten--that the postwar world would, as the Nazis had decreed, relegate the experience to the night and fog. Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, writing in Italy on the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, lamented that it was now considered "bad taste to speak of the concentration camps." (10) This situation angered and frustrated Cayrol as well. Though he was a respected poet, Cayrol had trouble publishing his Poems of the Night and Fog immediately after the war. (11) Shortly before Resnais approached him to write the script for his film, Cayrol had a revealing experience. At Mauthausen, Cayrol's fellow prisoners had hid him under a work table where he had written poetry as they worked. Cayrol lost these poems when the camp was liberated, but they were returned to him by an anonymous German in 1955. When Cayrol sought a publisher for the poems, he was told that it was time for "survivors to forget, to be quiet," and the poems were not published until 1997. (12) Night and Fog was a response to this environment. With the wide dissemination of the film, reference to "night and fog" became a way of affirming that memory of the camps and those sent to them must not be repressed or forgotten in line with the Nazi decree of 1941.