Perhaps four million of those imprisoned, more than half of the prisoners, did not survive. 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. The numbers on this subject are mind-numbing. So then what kind of meaningful understanding can be developed concerning the Nazi concentration camps? Naturally, these two perspectives – our personal views about ourselves and our views about the social world around us – are closely linked. And the narratives we construct about past historical events similarly represent how we culturally view those historical events. The narratives that we construct about ourselves represent how we see ourselves. I have discussed in past reviews how we fundamentally understand ourselves, as temporal agents, in terms of narratives, and this perspective harmonizes with Resnais’s presentations in his works. One could say that our very notions of time, and ultimately of our selves, are intimately linked with our memorial representations. Resnais had the key insight that our memories constitute an essential aspect of how we deal with time, itself. 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. 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. 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. For that project he shifted his narrative to a differnt, more personal, level, and crafted another masterpiece in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). But he changed his mind on that occasion, too, by making something quite different. Interestingly, a few years later Resnais would have similar misgivings when invited to make a film about the Hiroshima nuclear holocaust. 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. 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. 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 ).Ĭertainly 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.
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