Night and Fog
Director: Alain Resnais
Historical Consultants: Olga Wormser, Henri Michel
Music: Hanns Eisler
Text: Jean Cayrol
Camera: Ghislain Cloquet, Sacha Vierny
The first important documentary about the Holocaust, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog
(1955), is now half a century old. In 1954 the French publisher Hachette produced a
book of eyewitness accounts of the Nazis' war against the Jews of Europe, selected by
historians Olga Wormser and Henri Michel. The producer Anatole Dauman visited an
exhibition on the same theme at the invitation of Wormser and decided that a film
should be made about this subject. He approached Alain Resnais (b. 1922), who had
already made several distinguished documentaries about artists, but had not yet begun
his career as a maker of feature-length films. (He would go on to make such famous
films as Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad—films which, like Night and
Fog, are fascinated by the continuities and disjunctions between the past and the
present, and by the themes of memory and forgetfulness.) Reluctant at first to accept
this assignment, Resnais insisted on having the novelist Jean Cayrol as the writer of the
film’s voiceover narration. Cayrol, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis at
Mauthausen, had published a volume of poems (Poems of Night and Fog) about his
experience immediately after the war.
In thinking about Night and Fog, please consider the following issues:
 In what specific ways does this film differ from American documentaries about
the Holocaust?
 What is the relationship between sound and image in Night and Fog? In
particular, what is your reaction to the hypnotic cadences of the narrator’s voice?
How does the contrast between color and black-and-white photography function
in the film? What are some of the striking features of composer Hanns Eisler’s
musical score? Is this score different from the kind of music we associate with
Hollywood films? In what respects is the editing of the film crucial to its impact?
 One of the principles of the classic French art of the great playwrights Corneille
and Racine is a rigorous austerity: the subject may be emotionally devastating,
but the language remains formal and the perspective of the artist impersonal.
How does that principle operate here, and is it effective?
 As the film unfolds, the images become increasingly shocking and disturbing.
Did the director go too far, or was it necessary, in 1955, to shock the conscience of
the audience?
 It is perhaps understandable that the French censors forced Resnais to delete a
French policeman’s uniform from a few frames of the film: in 1955 it was not yet
possible in France for the cinema to address such painful subjects as French
collaboration with the Nazis and participation in the Holocaust. But why does
the director refrain from making specific references to Jews (aside from a few
proper names)? Why, in other words, does the first major documentary about
the Holocaust avoid mentioning the obvious fact that the Jews were Hitler’s
principal victims?
Phillip Lopate, an essayist, novelist, and film critic, has written a fine essay about Night
and Fog to accompany the Criterion DVD restoration of the film. Here are some
excerpts from that excellent essay:
“The rap against most Holocaust films is that they exploit the audience’s feelings of
outrage and sorrow for commercial ends; and, by pretending to put us vicariously
through such a staggeringly incomprehensible experience, they trivialize, reducing it
to sentimental melodrama. Alain Resnais has done nothing of the kind. Making this
film in 1955, only ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps, with the
wounds so fresh, he did not presume, first of all, to speak for the victims and survivors
of the camps: he chose as his screenwriter Jean Cayrol, a man who had actually been
imprisoned in one. Second, neither he nor Cayrol presumed to offer a comprehensive
guide to the concentration camp universe. Quite the contrary: the voiceover is filled
with skepticism and doubt and a sympathetic awareness of the viewer’s resistance,
conscious or unconscious, to grasping the unthinkable….
“Night and Fog is, in effect, an anti-documentary: we cannot ‘document’ this particular
reality, it is too heinous, we would be defeated in advance. What can we do, then?
Resnais and Cayrol’s answer is: we can reflect, ask questions, examine the record, and
interrogate our responses. In short, offer up an essay….
“This effort at analysis and reflection is one of the ways the filmmakers work to evade
pious sentimentality: indeed, the voiceover narration is delivered in a harsh, dry,
astringent tone, filled with ironic shadings. The magnificent score by Hanns Eisler is
also employed ironically: the lovely, lyrical flute passages collide with harrowing
images; the Schoenbergian pizzicato strings signal the revving up of the Nazi war
machine….
“This film also anticipates, and helps bring about, a whole fascinating, cutting-edge
genre, the essay-film, championed especially by Chris Marker (who collaborated with
Resnais), practiced as well by such diverse figures as Michael Moore, Jean-Luc Godard
[and others]. These filmmakers have rejected the objective neutrality presumptions of
traditional documentaries, and have striven to turn film into a medium expressive of
idiosyncratic, personal thought.”
The issues Lopate highlights in this discussion will be important for us throughout our
course: how can makers of films address this dreadful subject without trivializing or
sentimentalizing it? How can cinema, with its preference for clear and coherent
narratives, address suffering on a scale and of a kind that defies our comprehension?
If Lopate is right, the essay-film is one possible solution. But as we will see, it is not
the only one.