Nuit et Brouillard

[Dave Monroe]

... just one of these things I happen upon with resonances here.  From
Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of french Filmmaking
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), Chapter 14, "Filmmaking at the
Margins," pp. 354-78 ...

Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) is not only [Alain] Resnais'
best-known documentary; it is also probably the most frequently screened
and discussed of all films about the Holocaust.  Yet the film's
political engagement took a form little recognized either at the time or
since.  Perhaps the most curious aspect of this widely admired study of
the Nazi death camps is that a historically naive spectator could watch
it virtually unaware of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the
victims it depicts were Jews.  The work studiously avoids such
historical specificity; as has often been remarked, it is not so much
about the camps as about the memory of them--a theme which has obvious
resonances with the director's later work in fiction features.
    Nuit et Brouillard is a film about past and present, its central,
anguished question only posed at the very end: could this happen again?
When, almost three decades after its release, Charles Krantz asked
Resnais about the film's political intent, the director replied, "The
whole point was Algeria," where French forces had already committed, and
were continuing to commit, their own racially motivated atrocities.
Probably sobered by the suppression of Les Statues meurent aussi
["banned outright by the government after one showing"], Resnais and
scriptwriter Jean Cayrol kept this contemporary political parallel
completely implicit.  Nuit et brouillard thus remains a film which
subtly dehistoricizes genocide, turning the viewer's attention, to a
great extent, away from specific victims and specific criminals.  This
universalizing tendency gives the spectator a great deal of freedom in
reading the film, and it becomes a kind of historical Rorschach test.
Most viewers don't even notice its curious reluctance to explain that
the German death industry was devised to "solve" the so-called Jewish
problem.  (369)

... I didn't notice this "reluctance," either, having watched Night and
Fog on video some time back, but, as I recall, Williams'
characterization of the film is entirely correct.  Resnais is of course
perhaps best known as the director of the Marguerite Duras-scripted
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), in which ...

... the experience of a French woman who had a German lover during the
Occupation is systematically juxtaposed with a meditation on the impact
of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima.  this daring, potentially
tasteless metaphor is given surprising force and clarity by the
development of a common theme of memory: what does it mean to remember a
traumatic event, and does the telling of the story neutralize, fatally,
its impact?  Hiroshima mon amour is even less about the atomic bomb, or
the Occupation, than Nuit et Brouillard is about the Holocaust.
(Williams, pp. 370-1).

... which is not to say that the bomb, the Occupation, the Holocaust,
are not dealt with, to a significant extent, in a significant fashion,
in these works.  Does raise some interesting (aesthetic, ethical,
political) issues, but ... but, seeing as Leo Bersani comes up from time
to time, see also ...

Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit.  Arts of Impoverishment:
    Beckett, Rothko, Resnais.  Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP,
    1993.

... which I've only just picked up, so ...