Released in 1956, barely a
decade after the end of World War II, Night And Fog was one of the first films
to deal with the subject of Nazi concentration camps. Although a short subject,
the film had a troubling production and release. Initially, the premise came
about from an exhibition by Henri Michel and Olga Wormser (Resistance,
Liberation, Deportation), which opened on November 10th, 1954 at
Institut Pedagogique National in Paris. On it’s opening day, public notice was
given of a proposed film project. Although Michel was under pressure to make a
film honoring the French resistance fighters, Wormser argued for a more
scholarly, broad approach focusing on the concentration camps, and Michel saw
that this would enable wider financing. As such, producers Anatole Dauman, Samy
Halfton and Philippe Lifchitz were invited to the exhibit and felt a film
should be made. Dauman contacting the initially reluctant Alain Resnais (who
felt someone with direct experience should address the subject matter), who
would later agree to direct on the basis that poet and novelist Jean Cayrol,
himself a concentration camp survivor, be brought in as a collaborator. This is
a key example of the collaborative approach Resnais took as a filmmaker, and
Cayrol’s scripted dialogue, which became the narration read by actor Michel
Bouquet is a crucial part to our intellectual understanding of the barbarisms
the film explores. The film’s long tracking shots, by Ghislain Cloquet and
Sacha Vierney of the large, open, empty spaces of the camps, capture a
terrible, terrible beauty inside these places where unspeakable things
occurred. The film is immaculately put together by Jasmine Chasney and Henri Colpi,
whose multimodal collection includes the original footage shot in the camps,
black-and-white archive stills, excepts from older French, Soviet and Polish
newsreels, footage shot by detainees of the Westernbork internment camp, and
from the Allies’ ‘clean-up’ operations. The film features contributions from
Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, whose chilling score adds to the overall
atmosphere of the piece. Indeed, the atmosphere during production created
issues for many of the main players. Eisler felt under a lot of pressure to
finish his work, Cayrol, feeling sick while scribing to the images, was aided
by Chris Marker (an unsung hero on the project) in writing the film, and
Resnais suffered nightmares during the preproduction and was upset through the editing
process. Upon release, despite initial opposition from both French censores and
the German embassy (producer Dauman, though proud to be a part of the film,
guaranteed to Resnais that “It will never see a theatrical release,” and most
notably, a local association of former deported prisoners insisted the film be
shown at the Cannes Film Festival, threatening to occupy the screening room in
their camp uniforms), it was widely acclaimed. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze of
Cahiers du Cinema compared its power to the works of Franz Kafka and Francisco
Goya, and his contemporary, the great writer-direction and critic Francois
Truffaut, referred to it as the greatest film ever made. Today, it retains a
strong legacy. Sight And Sound magazine named it in a 2014 poll the fourth
greatest documentary of all time, it stands as one of the greatest works in the
life and career of Alain Resnais, and one of the great testaments of the
horrors of war and inhumanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment