Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Renais’s Night and Fog edited by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (review)

Owing to America’s obsession with cinema as entertainment, the title “Concentrationary Cinema” may at first glance seem oxymoronic. But it is not. This collection is a deeply intelligent reassessment of Alain Renais’s important 1955 film, a signal reference for anyone interested in the representation of traumatic memory. The articles examine both the politics and aesthetics of cinematic representations of catastrophic events that surpass our understanding. In their introduction, Pollock and Silverman ask that we read Night and Fog not as a Holocaust film—an anachronistic reading in their view that typically criticizes the film’s failure to focus on the attempt to exterminate the Jewish and Romany peoples—but as one that compellingly lays bare the concentrationary system practiced by the Nazis, which remains possible anytime, anywhere. The need for constant vigilance, emphasized in the film’s voiceover, scripted by French poet Jean Cayrol, is as urgent now as it was in 1944 when the camps were fully operational. As the editors explain:

The concentrationary is both a historical and a conceptual tool. Historically, it relates to a specific space and to the problems relating to both the representability of that space and the legibility of the images created as its witnessing and archiving.

(8)

The industrial killing of Jews and Romany often took place in separate death camps, particular locations with that singular goal. The Third Reich also created prison camps, slave labor camps, and re-education camps within its totalitarian system, all of which need to be recognized and theorized individually as well as collectively. The camps’ populations rose from about 4,000 in 1933 to 700,000 in 1945; an estimated 1.2 million died in the camps from brutality, starvation, and overwork. Using both Giorgio Agamben’s reflections and Primo Levi’s personal witnessing, Pollock and Silverman underscore how the camps existed as a “state of exception,” whose purpose was the destruction of the humanness of their inhabitants, making the human corpse or so-called Muselmann their epitome (15).

Taking Night and Fog, then, as an exemplar of concentrationary cinema, nine contributors plus the two editors provide essays that engage with both the film and the concept of concentrationary cinema as a politics of representation that is intricately linked to the specific aesthetic choices of the filmmaker. Renais’s radical use of documentary photos and footage, disturbing montage, and traveling shots that muddy the boundaries of past and present all work to make us aware of how we’ve become used to the techniques of cinema without questioning them (that is, the very techniques the Nazis used to document the camps). Contrary to common cinematic practices, Renais’s self-conscious, thoughtful choices pull us into an inescapably haunting past, then position us as passive spectators. The title, Night and Fog, comes directly from the decree that set up slave labor camps. These camps intentionally cut their inhabitants off from the outside world, erasing them as civil subjects when the abbreviation NN (Nacbt und Nebel Ertass) was affixed to their jackets. The essays alert us not only to the film’s history, but also to how that history connects to other attempts to preserve the memory of the camps. Contributors subject Renais’s film to new readings and analyses that are informed by a wide range of theorists from Adorno and Foucault to Benjamin, Sontag, and Hannah Arendt, who like David Rousset before her, linked the concentrationary universe to the politics of capitalism and imperialism (21).

Sylvie Lindeperg reviews the creation of Renais’s film, calling it a palimpsest that relies heavily on archival documents and discoveries that were available in 1954. Jean Cayrol had difficulty looking at the archival images and was helped by Chris Marker, who rewrote the poet’s first commentary. The famous string prelude that marks the film was not an original piece; composed by Hanns...