Nuit et Brouillard
France
1955
Director: Alain Resnais
Production Co.: Argos Films / Como Films
Commentary written by: Jean Cayrol
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet &
Sacha Vierney
Editors: Henri Colpi & Jasmine Chasney
Music: Hanns Eisler
Narrator: Michel Bouquet
31
minutes
16
mm
Black
& White / Colour
French,
with English subtitles
Certificate
remarkable for its sensitive and
unusual approach to the subject
- The Oxford Companion to Film
Nuit et
Brouillard..., along with Paul
Celan's poem 'Todesfuge', is one of the two best artistic treatments of the
death camps I know; elegiac yet restrained, understated yet terrible.
- John Simon, Something to
Declare: Twelve Years of Films from Abroad
And there are those of us who look
concernedly at these ruins as if the old Concentration monster were dead in the
rubble... those of us who pretend to believe that all this happened long ago,
and in another country, who never think to look around us, who never hear the
cry that never ends.
- Jean Cayrol, from Night and Fog
In
32 brief minutes, director Alain Resnais offers a counterpoint to Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will (q.v.),
brilliantly achieving what dozens of other documentaries and feature films have
laboured hours for: evoking the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and
conveying the message for succeeding generations that it could easily happen
again. Resnais creates his essay of
evil like a master composer at the keyboard, using still photos, wartime
footage, and contemporary film of the abandoned camps to sum up the Holocaust
in a few powerful images.
-
The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made, New
York, 1994
This
is a tour of the ruins of Auschwitz in the mid-1950s, filmed in colour but
intercut with black-and-white archive material of the horrors that took place
there not too many years before. The
peak of Resnais' eight short films prior to his feature debut Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), was
reached with this moving and thought-provoking documentary. The carefully controlled commentary,
narrated by Michel Bouquet and written by ex-deportee Jean Cayrol, as well as
the gentle music, contrast starkly with the newsreels of the concentration camp
victims - the past intrudes upon the present, memory precludes forgetting. The theme and the long exploratory tracking
shots were to become characteristics of Resnais' feature films.
-
The Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide, London, 1988
During
[the fifties] the imprint of a personal style had appeared in a small number of
documentaries exquisitely refined and polished and informed with consummate
skill and power to evoke the purpose for which they were made. First among them was Alain Resnais' Night and Fog, a cool, grave
semi-compilation film on the Nazi concentration camps, made in collaboration
with Jean Cayrol, the novelist and poet, himself a former camp prisoner, and
Hanns Eisler, the composer and former associate of Brecht, who had been driven
from Germany by Hitler. The poetic
intensity of Night and Fog sprang
from a sophisticated humanism and a scrupulous concern for style. The film not only revealed the truth about
the horrors of Auschwitz, but - because of its construction, moving in a
purposeful counterpoint between the tragedy of the past and the forgetfulness
of the present - energized a form that became a constant reminder that the past
was always present, and a warning of what everyone was capable of in a society
that did not respect the elementary rights of all its citizens.
-
Lewis Jacobs, The Documentary Tradition, New York, 1979
Starting
from actual documents - news clips, photos, archives - and joining them to
images that he filmed last year, Alain Resnais has given us a cruel but
deserved history lesson.
It
is almost impossible to speak about this film in the vocabulary of cinematic
criticism. It is not a documentary, or
an indictment, or a poem, but a meditation on the most important phenomenon of
the twentieth century.
Nuit et Brouillard treats deportation and
the concentration camps with a flawless tact and quiet restraint that make it a
sublime work... 'uncriticizable'... almost 'undiscussable'.
The
power of this film, which opens with the image of grass springing up by the
abandoned watchtowers, crushed underfoot by police, is rooted in its tone, the
terrible gentleness which Alain Resnais and Jean Cayrol, who wrote the
commentary, were able not only to create but to maintain...
Miles
and miles of film are shown every day in studios around the world. For one evening we must forget to think of
ourselves as critics or moviegoers.
Here we are involved as human beings who have to open our eyes and
question ourselves. For a few hours Nuit et Brouillard wipes out the memory
of all other films. It absolutely must
be seen.
When
the lights go on at the end, no one dares applaud. We stand speechless before such a work, struck dumb by the
importance and necessity of these thousand metres of film.
-
François Truffaut, The Films in My Life, London, 1980
Resnais
made a slight reputation in 1950 with Guernica,
an essay built around Picasso's painting, and he consolidated it in 1956 with Nuit et Brouillard, commissioned by the
Comité de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale
to mark the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration
camps. Resnais took an Eastmancolour
camera to Auschwitz, to photograph the red-brick ruins languishing under a blue
autumn sky, and as the camera begins to probe the commentator falls
silent. Both he and the colour give
way, so that newspaper newsreels and clippings tell something of what happened
there between 1941 and 1945. The film's
title derives from the order to destroy human beings, which became known as the
'Night and Fog' decree. The film is one
epitaph on the Thousand Year Reich.
Another was spoken by Hans Frank as he was led to the gallows at
Nuremberg, "a thousand years shall pass and Germany's guilt will not be
expunged," though the film's own final comment, "Je ne suis pas responsable" is equally moving in context. Resnais' shattering half-hour film is
essential to anyone trying to understand this century, yet it is still
inadequate.
-
David Shipman, The Story of Cinema: An Illustrated History, London, 1984
Alain
Resnais builds up his film on a counterpoint of present and past; the horrors
of yesterday, shown in black and white, through documents, films and
photographs found in German, Polish and French archives, and the return to
peace today, shot in colour, at what remains of Auschwitz. The opening images are of springtime; nature
itself seems to encourage forgetfulness; and then, suddenly, the camera swoops
down to the barbed wire... We enter the
dead abandoned setting of what - only ten years ago - was man's most rational
enterprise for exterminating man. So
the past becomes the conscience of the present, its tormenting question mark;
and the spectator has to ask himself - how was this possible...
The
rhythm of the film is very slow: tranquil, one might almost say. It matches the meditative quality given to
even the most atrocious images by Jean Cayrol's admirable commentary. Cayrol, poet and novelist, was himself
deported to Germany; his commentary has a fine poetic intensity, gives an extra
edge to the already knife-sharp images.
-
Sight & Sound, Spring 1956