On Brittain and Spotton’s Memorandum

About Memorandum Amos Vogel, in his book Film as a Subversive Art, declared: “With [Alain Resnais’ 1955] Night and Fog, this is unquestionably the most sophisticated film yet made on the philosophical and moral problems posed by the concentration camp universe.”¹ Vogel praises what he calls “a complex filmic structure, combining cinéma vérité and a constant mingling of past and present.”²

Donald Brittain (1928–1989) was a Canadian documentary filmmaker whose work frequently explored the lives of iconic (and usually controversial) Canadian personalities, from communist sympathizer Norman Bethune (Bethune, 1964) to Parti Québécois founder and separatist René Lévesque (The Champions trilogy, 1978–1986). His films critique how Canadians define themselves, and the dehumanizing effects of routine and bureaucracy, an issue central to Memorandum. His collaborator on the film was John Spotton (1927–1991), a cinematographer, director, and editor at the National Film Board of Canada. Spotton’s work on Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor’s Lonely Boy (1962) helped popularize the cinéma vérité movement in the early 1960s.

I first saw Memorandum in an undergraduate class on Canadian documentary cinema. At the core of Memorandum is what Brittain would later call the “Canadian hook”—the story of Bernard Laufer, a Toronto glass cutter and Bergen Belsen survivor who returns to Germany in 1965 on a tour of his old concentration camp. As Laufer’s pilgrimage unfolds, the filmmakers show us images of postwar life in Germany and Austria. What becomes instantly clear is how quickly things seem to have reverted back to “normal.” Restaurateurs prepare for Oktoberfest while fresh grass grows over Dachau, and Belsen’s barracks are now a NATO firing range—what the film calls a “German garden.” “Everything is green, everything is nice,” remarks a survivor. The older generation wants to “change the subject,” says a German youth. The film, meanwhile, rejects this willful ignorance, this notion that the Holocaust is history and Hitler’s campaign is in the past.

Memorandum’s indictment of Western routine and “ordinariness” underscores the notion that the atrocity was perpetuated by people simply doing their jobs. The systematic extinction of European Jewry, the film suggests, was carried out by ostensibly ordinary individuals—sane, God-fearing citizens who simply claimed to be following orders. Hannah Arendt (whose coverage of the Eichmann trial would inspire Brittain to pitch the Memorandum project to the National Film Board of Canada) famously dubbed this the “banality of evil.”³ Birkenau, a camp that the film tells us “once consumed 12,000 humans a day, two and a half million in two and a half years [. . .] was not the work of mad men, but a product of Western civilization.” Memorandum dismisses any attempt to rationalize the Holocaust as a singular act of insanity: the film maintains that “once a crime has been committed, it becomes for all time a potentiality.”

Compared to the unfiltered brutality of Resnais’ film, Memorandum’s approach to the Holocaust is subdued and intentionally detached. Rather than attempting to explore the totality of the genocide, Memorandum offers images of a modern, urban Berlin, a city that fundamentally does not want to talk about the war. An accusatory camera silently judges throngs of middle-aged Germans commuting through the city. The conceit here is that the ordinariness of civilized life in postwar Germany has become something terrifying and unshakably wrong. The film’s title is indicative of its central concern: Brittain and Spotton ponder the links between those soldiers who physically executed prisoners and those who “murdered by memorandum, who did the filing and the typing from nine o’clock to five, with an hour off for lunch.”

Memorandum’s condemnation of the mundane, however, does not end with Germany. After all, says Laufer’s son Joey, the citizens of Munich and Berlin “seem to be like any other people.” What Brittain and Spotton are attacking is the impulse to derive comfort from the familiar while treating the past as static history. Putting...