Nuit et Brouillard (no 33)

 

by Allan Fish

(France 1955 31m) DVD1/2

Aka. Night and Fog

Who is responsible then?

d  Alain Resnais  w  Jean Cayrol  ph  Ghislain Cloquet, Sacha Vierny  ed  Alain Resnais  narrated by  Michel Bouquet

Nuit et Brouillard is a film that should be preserved for all time above nearly every other.  Just as the hell on earth of Nazi death camps stand as a ghostly memoriam of the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime, so does Resnais’ superbly subtle documentary.  Indeed, everyone who has understandably cried with horror and shame through Schindler’s List or, for those of braver constitutions, Shoah or the BBC’s Auschwitz, they should also see this film.  I’m sure Messieurs Spielberg and Lanzmann have.

            The film opens to a shot of what seem merely desolate almost dislocated fields, lost in and forgotten by time.  Then the camera pans down to reveal a high wire fence that bears the all too familiar ring of authenticity.  We are at Auschwitz, the most infamous place on earth in the twentieth century, equally the darkest century in mankind’s comparatively infant history.  The narrator may confirm that “the cameras are now the only visitors“, but as the cameras prowl those evil corridors and walls, there is a discomforting feeling of not being alone.  We are in the most unfortunate of company, surrounded by the ghostly cries and spirits of millions of victims of one man’s unprecedented sick plan to create a master race and state.  Each turn of the camera reveals another atrocity, from the bunks of the inmates to the showers of the gas chambers of death, from the ovens used to dispose of thousands of charred corpses a day to the disquietingly deceptive buildings used for hospitals and surgeries which were butcher houses for the sickest minds of their age.  We see, or rather are prompted towards, the scratches of the fingernails in the concrete roof and they scratch at the fabric of our collective soul.  At first glance, to those unacquainted, the whole site seems like a mere complex of farms, but though the inhabitants of these buildings were treated like animals in an abattoir, these victims were human beings, killed by other human beings as a matter of political expedience.  To the inmate, “his world was now finite, sealed off by watchtowers“, the eponymous night and fog relating to the N and N (“Nacht und Nebel“) written on the back of the inmates’ standard blue and white striped prison garb. 

            Resnais’ film doesn’t simply show us the camp and its ghostly images, but goes back to 1933 and the birth of its sick vision.  Or, in simpler terms, “the job has begun.”  We see the Nazis marching upon Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 and follow him through the early years of the war when the inmates were not exterminated but used as free labour to support the German war effort.  By 1942, the Wannsee conference had decreed the final solution and plans were made to turn the work camps into death camps.  Contracts for concentration camps are sold like contracts to build shopping centres may be today, only these architects “calmly design doorways to be entered only once.”  More horrific are the images of dead piled high in mass graves that make even those of the Black Death of 1346 seem like a bout of the common cold in comparison.  Yet that was destruction on a different scale; a higher proportion of dead, for sure, but dead by a sick stroke of fate, not by one faction or man’s design.  We see the images of the dismembered bodies, some decapitated for fun and their heads placed in baskets, others grossly disfigured by the gut-wrenching experimental procedures performed on them, still more from which the guards tried to make soap and, perhaps most apocalyptic of all, pieces of human skin with pornographic imagery drawn upon them; images all so barbaric as to defy humanity and seem unthinkable.  By the end, we are shown the guilty men saying they are not responsible and the narrator asks “who is responsible then?”  That’s one for the historians.  For the mere spectator anxious to exterminate the slightest chance of a repeat, we can only take the film to be the cinematic equivalent of Abel Gance’s final rise of the masses from their World War I graves in 1918 and cry “J’Accuse…”