Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition

12. Documenting the Ineffable: Terror and Memory in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog

Chapter 12 Documenting the Ineffable Terror and Memory in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog Sandy Flitterman-Lewis If one does not forget, one can neither live nor function. The problem arose for me when I made Nuit et brouillard. It was not a question of making yet another war memorial, but of thinking of the present and the future. Forgetting ought to be constructive. Alain Resnais, 1966 The common assumption about documentary film is that it confers on its subject the authority of history. Documentary commits its actors and events to the historical record—assertive, inviolable, and impervious to the distortions of perception, passion, or psyche. But it is precisely these “distortions ” that have concerned Alain Resnais throughout his career. Whatever stories his films tell, they always provide a reflection on time, memory, history, and their relation to both personal and social identity. With Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), a 32-minute documentary made before his first feature fiction films, Resnais uses this complex relation between mind and material as the framework for an analysis of the Holocaust’s systematic extermination of millions. In spite of the unimaginable brutality and suffering associated with the Holocaust, this proves to be the ideal subject for Resnais, in part because histories of the Holocaust are almost always filtered through recollections, what survivors tell us. This works against Night and Fog 197 any single unified account, with its foregone conclusions, predetermined impact, and anticipated effects. Every present rendering of some moment of this past evokes the future in a temporal continuum whose constant is social responsibility. Because of this, Night and Fog achieves Resnais’s objective; it avoids the limitations of the war monument, whose finality, unproblematic meaning, and instant significance are the result of its capacity to surround history and keep it safely distanced in the past. Instead, the film’s open structure and unresolved tensions create a space for the viewer that invites contemplation. In so doing, Night and Fog becomes not only a powerful document of the past but a film about “forgetting and not forgetting,” posing a dialectical relation to history that produces true healing and social consciousness while unrelentingly narrating the horror of past events. Still, the project of a documentary about the Holocaust poses several problems, not the least of which is the possible neutralizing effect of excessive footage of atrocities. The newsreel images are so horrible, so viscerally disturbing, that defense and denial are unavoidably invoked. Yet how does one document inconceivable horrors and incalculable pain? How does one maintain the image’s power to shock without evoking either total disbelief or incapacitating grief? Resnais’s concept of “constructive forgetting” provides an answer by tempering forgetfulness with a call to action: “It is absolutely necessary to act. Inaction and withdrawal into oneself lead only to despair. The real danger is in passivity, in stopping the struggle, in giving up” (50). While Resnais’s emphasis on consciousness and memory might seem to contradict the objectivity associated with documentary, it is this very strategy that allows him to represent the unrepresentable, to image an unspeakable terror, and to simultaneously produce both anxiety and reflection on the part of the viewer, precisely the combination that turns documentary evidence into living history and social action. Night and Fog begins and ends with a fluid, contemplative camera that glides across the austere landscapes of deserted barracks, barbed wire, and weed-choked railroad tracks of the concentration camps in 1955. Within this symmetrical frame, Resnais experiments with multiple temporalities, moving back and forth between the muted colors and abandoned sites of these tracking shots and black-and-white archival footage of every stage of the Final Solution, the efficient liquidation of the Jewish people (including still photographs and newsreels, documentation, shots from other films, including some from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Triumph of the Will, the state-sanctioned document of Nazi political power). This movement between present and past works in counterpoint to the painstaking linear chronology that details the bureaucratized genocide that was the cornerstone of Nazi policy. 198 S A N D Y F L I T T E R M A N - L E W I S The title “1933—The machine gets underway” introduces the spectacle of German military parades.1 The construction of the death camps, deportations , cattle cars, and the processing of prisoners all comprise this first section of the film. In...