Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog ed. by Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman (review)

encore français, cite Gide) et démontrant point par point que c’est l’obéissance à l’idéal communiste de son gouvernement qui l’a motivé. La caméra, qui ne l’intimide pas, semble être le premier volet du procès qu’il attend, du procès qui l’attend. D’une approche classique et sobre, le film est dépourvu de discours pacifiste ou accusateur explicite; il ne résout aucune des questions qu’il pose sur l’implication dans des crimes contre l’humanité de personnes à la “normalité” troublante. Ce sont cette humanité et l’absurdité de la condamnation de Duch, un minuscule maillon de la grande chaîne du gouvernement Pol Pot, qui ressortent de Le Khmer rouge et le non-violent de Bernard Mangiante (2011), documentaire tourné en même temps, sur les mêmes lieux, mais par une autre équipe et du point de vue de la défense de Duch, qu’il serait utile de voir en parallèle avec le Duch de Rithy Panh. De ces trois “textes” sur le même personnage, on peut cependant prédire que, bien que Panh s’estime avant tout cinéaste, c’est son livre L’élimination (recensé dans ce numéro, 590–91) qui fera référence sur Duch. Par sa nature éphémère, le documentaire filmique est en effet d’une immense fragilité. Dommage. Hamilton College (NY) Martine Guyot-Bender POLLOCK, GRISELDA, and MAX SILVERMAN, eds. Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. New York: Berghahn, 2011. ISBN 978-0-85745-351-8. Pp. 338. $95. In the aftermath of Shoah (1985), Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (1956) was cast retrospectively as a visually powerful, but ethically compromised, representation of the Holocaust. Where the subjects of Lanzmann’s epic eloquently embodied Jewish suffering, so the reasoning went, the largely archival treatment of the camps by Resnais, with commentary penned by political deportee Jean Cayrol, failed to acknowledge the racial specificity of the Final Solution. This provocative volume asks that we consider Nuit et brouillard not as a flawed “Holocaust film” (5), but rather on its own terms, as a modernist work of montage that singularly helped to unveil, just ten years after the Liberation, the horrors of what David Rousset had described as L’univers concentrationnaire (1947). A lengthy introduction retraces the development of the Nazi Konzentrationslager system and glosses key writings on the camps by Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. Though the concentrationary realm originates under capitalism and emerges—barbed wire, watchtowers, barracks and all—as “specific site in the network of Nazi terror” (23), it also reveals itself creatively in ‘Lazarean art,’ or art “made by the returnees from the universe of death, who have in some ways already died as human beings” and whose testimony sounds an alert for generations to come (29). For Pollock and Silverman, Nuit et brouillard stands as a “profoundly aesthetic gesture” that is “deeply thought cinematically” (44), so much so, perhaps, that their collaborators find few other works of documentary filmmaking to which properly to compare it. Eleven chapters present a wealth of perspectives on editing, spectatorship, political allegory, and theories of representation and historical responsibility. Sylvie Lindeperg, author of Nuit et brouillard: un film dans l’histoire (2007), retraces the project’s genesis with the Réseau du souvenir deportee group, the difficulties of Reviews 627 location shooting in Poland, and the film’s butchering in American and German distribution. Pursuing arguments from his Images malgré tout (2003), Georges Didi-Huberman probes the readability and afterlife of images of the camps, from the clandestine snapshot of a funeral pyre at Auschwitz reframed by Resnais to Samuel Fuller’s fictionalized The Big Red One. Complicity of spectators with filmed scenes of horror interests Libby Sexton, for whom Resnais’s use of edits and cropping “troubles clear-cut distinctions between innocent and culpable vantage points” (147). The French director’s quip of 1985 according to which “The whole point was Algeria” (165) prompts Debarati Sanyal to read Nuit et brouillard allegorically, associating it first with Camus’s La peste and then with Ousmane Sembène...