“Night and Fog” - Alain Resnais (1955)

Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard, 1955) is a 31-minute film about the Nazi concentration camps that has been called the greatest documentary film every made (indeed, Francois Truffaut called it simply the greatest film ever made [1]). 

Certainly the idea of making a film about such a horror must have been a daunting prospect to a person of Resnais’s integrity, and  when he was initially offered the opportunity to make this film, he declined on the grounds that he did not have the experiences to authentically engage with this subject [2].  He changed his mind when the poet, novelist, and essayist, Jean Cayrol, who himself had been a concentration camp survivor, was brought in as a script collaborator.  Cayrol’s most famous work, in fact, was his collection of poetry, Poèmes de la Nuit et du Brouillard (1946), concerning his sufferings in the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp [3].

Interestingly, a few years later Resnais would have similar misgivings when invited to make a film about the Hiroshima nuclear holocaust. But he changed his mind on that occasion, too, by making something quite different.  For that project he shifted his narrative to a differnt, more personal, level, and crafted another masterpiece in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959).  For the case here of Night and Fog, Resnais and Cayrol managed to come up with something that, in the space of half an hour, did bring about a meaningful presentation about the general topic at hand – the concentration camps.  This was done not by minute documentation of all the horrific details, but instead by providing a meditation into the very problem of trying to grasp just what happened back there in time.

This problem of trying to construct and hold on to meaningful memories of the past is something that has been a general focus of Resnais’s work and was addressed in virtually all of his movies.  Resnais had the key insight that our memories constitute an essential aspect of how we deal with time, itself.  One could say that our very notions of time, and ultimately of our selves, are intimately linked with our memorial representations.

I have discussed in past reviews how we fundamentally understand ourselves, as temporal agents, in terms of narratives [4], and this perspective harmonizes with Resnais’s presentations in his works.  The narratives that we construct about ourselves represent how we see ourselves.  And the narratives we construct about past historical events similarly represent how we culturally view those historical events. Naturally, these two perspectives – our personal views about ourselves and our views about the social world around us – are closely linked.  So then what kind of meaningful understanding can be developed concerning the Nazi concentration camps? 

The numbers on this subject are mind-numbing.  Over the course of the Nazi regime (1933-45), there were thousands (the precise number is disputed, depending on the definition of camps and sub-camps) of concentration camps constructed and millions of people imprisoned in them [5].  Perhaps four million of those imprisoned, more than half of the prisoners, did not survive.  A heavily disproportionate number of the victims were Jewish: at the end of the war, only about 21,000 of the original 600,000 Jews were left in Germany [6].  But statistical and documented accounts like these  [7] are difficult to get a feeling for; and Resnais wanted to pursue a different path toward understanding.

Night and Fog puts the viewer into the mind-frame of someone actively trying to track down what was the reality of the camps. We start off in the “present” (i.e. 1955) with color footage showing the empty and grass-overgrown grounds of some former concentration camps.  The camera moves incessantly as if searching for something. The tone of the narration is dispassionate, like an objective investigator. We can speculate that the subdued tone perhaps comes from a person like Cayrol who had experienced some of the horrors and is trying to approach the subject with some wounded trepidation.  In any case, the detached tone of the narrator is crucial and more effective than typical emotive narrations about past avoidable human tragedies, such as the US-Academy-Award-nominated To Die in Madrid (1963), which was narrated by John Gielgud and Irene Worth in very emotional tones.  Here in Night and Fog the dry narration and the distancing, almost frosty, music by Hanns Eisler put the viewer into almost a dream state to contemplate the unimaginable.

In those opening color shots of the empty countryside, the narration remarks that even following a pastoral country road can lead one to a concentration camp – just as the camera then pans over to a barbed-wire fence that encloses one such now-empty camp. Then the images shift to black-and-white footage documenting the early activities and decrees in 1933 that initiated the camps.  The film will proceed in this way, shifting back and forth at least twelve times between the color-signified “present” reflective mode and the black-and-white-signified documentary footage of the past.  The durations of the color sequences are actually quite short, but they always feature the prowling, searching camera movement that helps maintain the vitality and pace of the narration. 

Early on, the black-and-white footage shows the constructions and designs of the concentration camp buildings, where were relatively ordinary and mundane.  Then images are shown of the massive round-up activities, as the Nazis gathered the many ordinary people to populate these concentration camps.  In the early stages the prisoners were not specifically targeted to be Jewish.  The Nazis just wanted to imprison those they deemed to be troublemakers – activists, Communists, socialists, slackers, etc.  But after Himmler took over the overall management, they specifically went after “racially undesirable elements”, such as Jews, Romani, homosexuals, and people deemed to be criminals.  Associated with this was the 1941 “Nacht und Nebel” (which means “Night and Fog” in German) decree, which targeted anyone thought likely to support the resistance.

Gradually, the images become even more disturbing.  The workers were just treated like disposable slaves or animals.  An image of some stone steps leading to the Mauthausen quarry is accompanied with the remark that “3,000 Spaniards died to build these steps.” 

Again, in color, the narrator struggles to uncover what really happened in those quarters that looked like ordinary blockhouses. The explorations of the abandoned camp grounds takes the viewer over to some curious buildings: a hospital, even a prison.  The hospitals were often used for experimental amputations, as if the prisoners were laboratory rats.  Similarly, major drug companies tested the effects of danerous drugs on prisoners. The prisons were closed quarters where even more unspeakable torture could be inflicted on those who disobeyed.

Later, some of the camps were turned into extermination camps, specifically designed to kill its short-term visitors.  When new inmates arrived at such camps in boxcars, they were immediately separated: “workers” were instructed to go to the left, while those ordered to the right were destined for immediate execution. The Nazi overseers of the camps strove for efficiency and found that Zyklon B cyanide-based pesticide was particularly effective as a lethal instrument. 

In the end we come to the most devastating images – shots showing the wasted bodies of tortured prisoners, as well as mounds of emaciated corpses.  The Nazis became more efficient in dealing with this wastage, too, replacing their death pyres with new ovens that “could deal with several thousand bodies a day.”

And nothing in the execution camps was wasted.  We see images showing mountains of women’s hair that was used to make clothing material and rugs.  Human bones were used to make fertilizer.  And “with the bodies they tried to make soap.”  Here we see humans being treated like animals.  But in fact we don’t even have to treat animals this way, and we shouldn’t.  I will return to this point.

At the end of Night and Fog, there is the question asked as to who is responsible.

“‘I’m not responsible’, says the kapo.” 

“‘I’m not responsible’, says the officer.” 

“Who is responsible, then?”

The film closes with a warning.  It says there are people around

“. . . who see the monster buried under these ruins. . . finding hope in being finally rid of this totalitarian disease, pretending to believe it happened but once, in one country, not seeing what goes on around us, not heeding the unending cry.”

Here was a concern expressed by Resnais and Cayrol just ten years after the concentration camps were exposed to the world that, as memory fades, people might lose track of what happened there and consider that to have been just one never-to-be-repeated anomaly. Now sixty years further on, the concern should be even greater, because those events have faded even further and are even more abstract in the popular consciousness.  What can we do to hold on to what happened there and help us see how those past events relate to what is going on around us today?   That is what you feel as the film comes to an end. 

To me this film highlighted two things worth considering in this respect.

1.  See this film
You can visit historical monuments and see the sights of historical events, but you are unlikely to be able to fathom what happened.  I have personally visited Dachau and Auschwitz and seen the exhibitions there, which were powerful.  But I got much more out of seeing Night and Fog than from paying those visits.  As the narration in Night and Fog remarks, there are limitations in what you can get from looking at architecture.  I have heard architects say that a building incorporates all the possible "journeys" and processes that can go on within it.  It is true that the building provides a spatially structured context, but it is too general for us to know everything that goes on there.  As the film commentary says,

“The reality of these camps is hard for us to uncover traces of now.”

“No image, no description, can capture their true dimension of constant fear.”

When we see those steps leading to the Mauthausen quarry, it is not evident from the architecture that 3,000 Spaniards died in the construction of those steps.  We have to be told that, and it is best that we are told within the structure of a narrative.  Night and Fog provides that narrative.

The “method of loci” (aka “memory palace”) is a memorization technique that combines architecture and narrative.  It consists of an imaginary journey (i.e. a narrative) through a remembered architecture (the “palace”), during which individual memories are stored in different palace locations.  Since our memories work through the construction and exploration of narrative structure, the method of loci offers up a customized narrative that one can use to store memories.  Resnais has done that for us in Night and Fog.  He presents a prowling narrator who (in color) wanders among the camp ruins and evokes images (in black and white) that fit into this memory-palace journey.  By seeing (and re-seeing) this film, we get a better feeling of what happened there.

2.  Consider the slaughterhouses
As I watched this film, I could see that the prisoners were treated like material objects.  They were put to slavish work in factory hellholes, and then when they were no longer useful, they were exterminated.  Their hair, bones, and bodies were then harvested to make further material objects.  This is the same thing that our modern society does to animals. It is worth remembering, however, that there are several negative outcomes that come from slaughtering animals for meat and material goods, as I have discussed earlier [8].  Such activities

• worsen our health,
• reduce the availability of water and arable land,
• greatly contribute to global warming

Moreover, there are also social issues in this regard that are equally important.  When animals are raised and then sent to the slaughterhouse, they are viewed as objects whose only value is the extent to which they contribute to our material utility.  We eat their meat and use their hair and skin to make clothing.  We close our eyes to the fact that animals are sentient beings who can anticipate and suffer.  When we heartlessly treat animals as senseless “things”, we close ourselves off from our own native capacities for compassion. 

Apart from the inhumanity of treating animals this way, there is a further damaging side effect – the transition from treating animals that way to treating humans that way is not such a big step. That is where the   problem gets worse. It would be better for everyone if we moved our society in the direction of universal compassion  – so that treating any animals, including humans, that way is held to be unthinkable. When I watched Night and Fog, I felt I was exploring animal slaughterhouses for humans, and it made me think of animal slaughterhouses, generally, as well. Maybe you will get that feeling, too, when you watch the film (it is freely available).
★★★★

Notes:

1. Phillip Lopate, “Night and Fog”, The Criterion Collection, (23 June 2003).
2. James Leahy, “Nuit et Brouillard”, Senses of Cinema, (May 2003).
3. Cayrol would go on to write the screenplay for Resnais’s Muriel (1963), which was also concerned efforts to fashion and hold on to memories about a disturbing past, in this case the Algerian War.
4. See for example, my reviews of
• “Memento” (2000), The Film Sufi, (1 April 2013).
• “Blow-up” (1966)，The Film Sufi, (14 August 2014).
• “The Passenger” (1975)，The Film Sufi, (15 November 2014).
5. “Nazi Camps”, Holocaust Encyclopedia, (20 June 2014), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, USA.
6. Roger Cohen, “Europe’s Deepest Debt”, International New York Times, (10 August 2015).
7. Richard J. Evans, “The Anatomy of Hell”, The New York Review of Books, (9 July 2015).
8. See my reviews of
• “Eating, 3rd Edition” (2009), The Film Sufi, (19 September 2010).
• "Earthlings" (2005), The Film Sufi, (14 February 2011).
• “Forks Over Knives” (2011), The Film Sufi, (16 November 2012).

“Le Deuxieme Souffle” - Jean-Pierre Melville (1966)

French film noir master Jean-Pierre Melville’s first full realization of his own take on this genre was with Le Doulos (1962). With Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), however, he plunged even deeper into the expressionistic gloom that pervades the entire world depicted in these stories. In a film noir, most of the characters are isolated and cynical lawbreakers with unknown pasts and uncertain futures.  They are just trying to survive to the next day in a chaotic and immoral universe.

A key aspect of a film noir is its presentation of existential alienation.  This feeling of loneliness and separation is externalized in these films to the entire environment, rather than examined by looking into the mental states of the characters, who are invariably taciturn and uncommunicative, anyway.  This is what makes the best of these film heavily expressionistic – the viewer seems to be inside an expressionistic nightmare that is being dreamed by noone in particular. 

The basic nature of a film noir is discussed in my review of Le Doulos, but here it is useful to summarize the three essential features:

• Fatalism.  Most of the characters are trying to escape from their pasts and have little hope for the future.
• Truth.  The world is dark and confused.  Noone seems to know the truth and the full story.
• Loyalty. Given the pervasiveness of opportunism and deceit, finding someone to trust and being trusted is of life-saving importance. This is often the dominant theme.

Note how a film noir differs from a typical gangster film: 

• In a gangster film – take Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1976) for example – existential isolation is usually not such a key factor. There is a boisterous community, a brotherhood. People here are constantly making jokes and loud boastful gestures as a way of maintaining their standing in this “community”. Loyalty to the brotherhood is important, but is generally presumed. And a hopeful future is often envisioned.
• In a film noir, on the other hand, everyone is cut off from each other. The dialogue is minimal, and communication is often conducted by brief glances and minimal gestures.  Loyalty is always in question and of fundamental importance.

In Le Deuxieme Souffle, a quintessential film noir, the features of fatalism, truth, and loyalty take center stage and are the major themes of the film.  The script is based on the 1958 novel by “José Giovanni” (Joseph Damiani), who, himself, was a former criminal and had spent 12 years in prison.  He had also authored the 1957 novel, Le Trou, which was made into the 1960 film of the same name directed by Jacques Becker.

The story of Le Deuxieme Souffle is complicated, and the viewer must struggle with the slow-disclosure revelation of information in order to make out what is happening and the relationships among the characters.  As is characteristic with many of Melville’s films, there are multiple focalizations, and the viewer is placed in the position of an extra “invisible witness” who is trying to get the best view of what is going on.  One can view the narrative as comprising five phases.

1.  Setting Things Up
In the first section of the film, the viewer is introduced to three separate theaters of action, which will eventually come together.  The film opens with a daring prison escape by three inmates – one in his early 20s, one in his 30s, and one in his late 40s.  In the early shots, they have to make a dangerous leap from the roof onto a tall, narrow parapet surrounding the prison.  The thirtyish guy makes the jump, but the younger man fails and falls to his death, while the older man just barely makes it.  Moments later the two survivors make it out and try to jump onto a passing freight train.  Again the older man just barely manages to make it onto the passing boxcar.  These opening images of desperation haunt the rest of the film.  We feel that the older man is unlikely to survive the dangers that are ahead of him.  In fact the English meaning of “Le Deuxieme Souffle” is “Second Wind” (or “Second Breath”), and there is a suggestion that this prison escape gives the older man, Gustave (“Gu”) Minda (played by Lino Ventura) his second wind in life.  But to me it is more like a last gasp, as the story gradually makes clear.   At any rate this first theater of action is centered on Gu.

A second theater of action is in Marseille, where nightclub owner and cigarette trafficker Paul Ricci (Raymond Pellegrin) is making arrangements with a police informer concerning some criminal heist they intend to pull of about six weeks later.  But Paul’s partner Jeannot first wants to make a quick trip to Paris to bump off someone named Jacques the Lawyer, who apparently has double-crossed them (i.e. he has been disloyal) somehow.

The third theater of action is in Paris, where Simone Pelquier (Christine Fabréga), who is known as “Manouche”, runs a posh restaurant affiliated with the Paris underworld.  Her bartender, Alban (Michel Constantin), is actually a tough gangster, but he is the embodiment of fierce loyalty and totally dedicated to Manouche’s welfare. She is being courted by Jacques the Lawyer, when Jeannot, from Marseille, shows up and guns Jacques down in the restaurant.  In the process Jeannot is mortally wounded.

Police commisaire Blot (played by Paul Meurisse, who was memorable in Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955) and Renoir’s Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (1959)) arrives with policemen to investigate. Blot is the face of law and order in the story, but he is utterly cynical about human honesty, truth, and integrity.  He only puts his faith in the scientific findings from his on-the-scene investigations.  At this crime scene he cynically informs Manouche and Alban that their old friend Gu, after having served ten years in the pen, has just escaped from prison, which suggests to the viewer that Gu must have had some past romantic relationship with Manouche.  Blot never tries to restrict or conceal things from the criminals he is watching.  He wants them to be free to make take the actions that will reveal their guilt.

That evening Manouche and Alban come to Manouche’s home, where they are ambushed for a shakedown by two thugs who eventually reveal that they were hired by Jo Ricci (Marcel Bozzuffi), Paul’s brother who runs a Paris nightclub.  But Gu makes his way to Manouche’s home and after getting the drop on the two thugs and taking them prisoner, summarily shoots them dead.  So Gu is now an enemy of Jo Ricci.

Up to this point the pace of all these scenes has been very rapid, but now things slow down.

2. Making the Connections
In this section of the film, various factions start coming together. Paul Ricci’s planned caper is revealed to be the highway robbery of a police-escorted truck carrying 500 kg of platinum.  The haul will be enormous, but with Jeannot now gone, Paul needs another trusted person to fill out his four-man team. He talks to his brother Jo and realizes that he can’t trust him.  Then he considers another person, Orloff, who may be available. 

Orloff turns out to be a key figure.  He is the ultimate film noir icon – taciturn, circumspective, always wearing his fedora, even indoors.  Orloff is also, somewhat like Alban, ultimately trustworthy, although because of his reticence he is always under suspicion. Anyway, Orloff is offered the job as the fourth member of the heist team, but he says he needs a week to think about it.

Meanwhile Blot figures, correctly, that Gu will attempt to assassinate Jo, and he sets up an ambush. But on arrival at Jo’s nightclub, Gu gets suspicious and backs away at the last moment.  So nothing happens on that occasion except atmospheric expectation.

Afterwards Manouche convinces Gu to go to Marseille, where she can keep her lover, Gu, in a hideaway and make arrangements to make an escape from France on a boat to Italy.

3.  The Caper
Out of some mysterious feeling of loyalty, Orloff wants to anonymously help Gu.  He arranges for a fake passport for him and gets Paul and his men to accept Gu as the fourth member of the platinum heist team. Paul’s readiness to accept Gu indicates that Gu passes the loyalty test in this noirish underworld. 

The actual platinum theft is shown in detail over 13 minutes of screen time with almost no dialogue.  Everything goes like clockwork.

4.  The Police Response
When the police in Marseille learn about the theft, they spring to action, led by the crude police inspector Fardiano (Paul Frankeur). But Commissaire Blot, from Paris, also arrives in Marseilles, because he suspects that it was Gu who killed the two thugs earlier back in Paris and now he thinks Gu is involved in this affair, too.  He relies on the scientific evidence of examining bullet casings to confirm his suspicions.

But Gu is now sporting a mustache and hard to locate.  His fascination for watching petanque bowling games on the Marseille streets, though, causes him to mingle among a crowd, and he gets recognized by an off-duty prison guard.  Blot then organizes an elaborate ruse to have fake gangsters capture Gu and get him to confess his crime.  The interesting thing about this action is that Blot knows Gu would never confess anything to the police – that would be getting his criminal associates into trouble and would therefore be an act of betrayal.  But Gu is more likely to speak the truth to fellow gangsters.  So Blot’s fake gangsters, equipped with a hidden tape recorder, capture Gu and accuse him of gang disloyalty (disloyalty to an evidently known gangster called “Nevada”).  Gu angrily denies having been disloyal to Nevada, but in the process inadvertently reveals who was involved in the platinum heist.

Gu is then arrested, and his taped confession is used to arrest Paul.  The contrast between the “scientific” Blot and the brutish Fardiano is highlighted here when Fardiano promptly employs torture (unsuccessfully) in an attempt to get Gu and Paul to give explicit confessions.

5.  The Windup
The beaten-up Gu is in the hospital and under police guard. And now, thanks to a false police lead to the newspapers, everyone thinks Gu has intentionally ratted on Paul and will rat on everyone else, too.  So Jo Ricci and Paul’s two still-at-large accomplices, Pascal and Antoine, want Gu to be bumped off.  Orloff, a staunch believer in Gu’s loyalty, says the news reports must be false and remains loyal to Gu.

So everything comes down to loyalty and the “honor among thieves” ethos that dominates the film noir psychospace. For the short-horizon noir characters, maintaining a clean loyalty reputation is more important than long-term planning about a future life.  And so Gu is desperate to break out of the hospital and clear his name.  There is still more than a half-hour of the film left, and you can see for yourself what happens in the end.

There is truly an emphasis in Le Deuxieme Souffle on loyalty and on determining whom one can trust in this dark and desperate netherworld, but the film’s coverage of this topic is not as simple as some people might think.  Considering those people who have a devotion to loyalty, we might identify Gu, Paul, Alban, and Orloff. On the other side, Jo, along with Paul’s other two accomplices, seem to have no sense of honor; they are pure opportunists ready to cash in on every opportunity.  In fact they dismiss Gu as old-fashioned and no longer up to the play of the modern criminal scene.  But is it really just a contest between these two groupings?

A number of reviewers see Gu as something of a dark hero in this story, upholding his honor at the risk of his life.  I do not see much to admire in Gu, other than his grim determination.  He kills seven people in this film, and none of them in self-defense.  He is a total short-term narcissist, who is primarily obsessed with maintaining his face in the underworld – even at the cost of his own life.  Paul is in the same league, having planned a highway heist that necessarily involved the planned murders of two policemen to pull it off.  So these two characters are not honorable, to my mind; they are simply relying on a credo that they have grown up with.  In the same way many of these ruthless gangsters, following their Roman Catholic upbringing, cross themselves when they are in the presence of (and often bringing about) death. There is no depth to their behavior and nothing to admire in their actions.

Moreover, Blot does not really offer a moral alternative.  He is more like a cynical Greek chorus, who watches and sometimes manipulates the events around him.  Although he believes in scientific investigations to uncover criminals, it is not clear that he strives for truth, since he explicitly lies to Manouche at the close of the film.  Whether that lie serves any purpose is not clear.

The two people who do have some honor, Manouche and the mysterious Orloff, are the only ones who are not self-destructively fatalistic and who have some feelings and make some plans for the future – in this case an attempt to secure a future life abroad for Gu.  They are also the most selfless characters in the story (Orloff actually doffs his fedora in the presence of Manouche).  Repeatedly Manouche hints at having a future life in some far away place with Gu.  This idea never really crosses Gu’s mind.  He is really just a ruthless killer living his beastly life from one day to the next – an iconic figure of the film noir nightmare.  We knew he was doomed from the very beginning.  Melville had opened the film, as was his wont, with a textual aphoristic quotation:

“A man is given one right at birth: to choose his own death. But if he chooses because he is weary of life, then his entire existence has been without meaning.”

Gu knew he was doomed, too, and he signaled this when, late in the piece, he shaved off his mustache.  He had become weary of his hopeless life but still wanted to preserve his face.
★★★

Vishal Bhardwaj

Films of Vishal Bhardwaj:

• Haider - Vishal Bhardwaj (2014)

John Woo

Films of John Woo:

• Red Cliff - John Woo (2008)

Vittorio De Sica

Films of Vittorio De Sica:

• Bicycle Thieves - Vitttorio De Sica (1948)