Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory

Wars on Trial in Three Landmark Documentary Films

Wars on Trial in Three Landmark Documentary Films Night and Fog, Hearts and Minds, and Taxi to the Dark Side Daniel L. Miller and Suzanne Clark We have all tried very hard to escape what we have learned. —Randy Floyd, American pilot during the Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds In the years since World War II, events have left the living with terrible, traumatic memories and moral questions they can remember only with pain, but cannot and must not forget. Do images give us a way to remember the conditions of war, and reflect ethically upon them? It has seemed to many, as Susan Sontag observes, that the power of photography might instead make us wary.1 Does the emotional shock of pictures depicting the violence of war in fact shortcut the ability of the viewer to reason, producing a kind of voyeurism, while the repetition of iconic images flattens critical, ethical thought? Some documentary films resolve this dilemma. Michael Rabiger states that documentary film at its best is like a court case.2 Such films approach the truths of terriblememoriesthroughaprocesslikethatnamedbyJayWinternotmemorybut “remembrance,”byincludingconflictingviewsthroughwitnesses,images,andfilm technique.3 Thusmemoryisnotstoppedbutratherputontrial—weighedthrough the diachronic processes of historical perspectives. In The Great War and Modern Memory,PaulFussellshowshowthetrenchwarfareof WorldWarIchangedwriters’ fundamentalwaysof thinkingabouttheother:itcreatedapolarized“modeof gross dichotomy” or “the modern versus habit” of irreconcilable opposition.4 Having experienced the concentration camps of World War II, philosopher Emmanuel Levinasarguesthatethicscannotexistinatimeless,either/orrelationshiptoatruth abouttheother,but,rather,takesplaceonlyindiachronic,historicaltime,intheacts 117 118 democratic narrative, history, and memory of responsibility called forth by difference—by the face of the other, which is not self and is more than self.5 The films this essay will discuss include Night and Fog, a 1955 documentary about Nazi concentration camps, directed by Alain Resnais and written by Jean Cayrol; Hearts and Minds, a 1975 documentary about the Vietnam War, directed by Peter Davis; and Taxi to the Dark Side, a 2007 documentary about the torture policies practiced by the United States as part of the war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, written and directed by Alex Gibney. These films enact and question the traumatic human stories that are associated with war and the dehumanizing of the other, who in fact might be not the military enemy but rather the victim of patriotic mythologies. As the films show, these histories of violence may be deforming not only to the victims and the perpetrators, but also to those who think themselves not responsible. NightandFog(Nuitetbrouillard)isathirty-one-minuteFrenchdocumentaryfilm that portrays the facts of historical evil in the Nazi concentration camps of World WarII.6 Itwascommissioned,produced,anddistributedin1955,undertheauspices of thehistorianHenriMichel,theFrenchCommitteeof theHistoryof WorldWarII (Comité d’Histoire de Deuxième Guerre) and the Archives of the Memory (Réseau duSouvenir),anassociationdevotedtothememoryof thosedeportedtothecamps. Night and Fog immediately came under scrutiny and censorship for two things: its depiction of French police officers during World War II guarding a contingent of deportees being herded toward trains to the camps and its use of horrific archival images, particularly during the last ten minutes of the film. Director Alain Resnais agreed to disguise the police emblems on the uniforms of the French officials but was allowed to retain the images used in the film’s final ten minutes. The film was inspired by Poems of Night and Fog (Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard ), the poetic memoirs of French author, resistance fighter, and concentration campsurvivorJeanCayrol,whowrotethescriptforthenarrationof thefilm.Cayrol was a victim of the Nazi regime’s effort to make those who opposed it disappear by sending them to their deaths in the camps, as if into the night and fog. The policy, announced in 1941, was called NN, Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog). While the film does not tell the stories of individuals, in its entirety it may be seen as a form of testimony. Because Cayrol is writing of a history he knew firsthand, even the expository dryness with which he relates facts becomes a public witness to the embodied horrors of the Nazi camps, the scope of which would fully emerge only later, through the testimonies about the Holocaust.7 The most innovative and provocative formal and aesthetic choices in the film arise both from the use of archival photos, which give face to the unthinkable, and from decisions to shoot footage of the deserted but intact camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz in color, and then to edit that together with the mostly black-and-white archival still and moving images, using analytical and idea...