Alain Resnais’s half-hour on the camps, shot in colour at Auschwitz and cut against the archive, is as clear and as hard to watch as it was in 1956. Hanns Eisler’s music will divide people. See it once, and see it whole.
Alain Resnais made Night and Fog in 1956, a decade after the camps were opened, and it runs thirty-two minutes. Sacha Vierny and Ghislain Cloquet shot the present in colour at Auschwitz: a camera moving at walking pace along a fence, across a field, into a brick building with nothing in it. Between these shots Resnais, who also edited the film, cuts to what the place looked like when it was full. Jean Cayrol wrote the commentary and Michel Bouquet reads it. We would tell a stranger to see it, and we would not tell them much else first.
The design is simple and it never wavers. Colour means now; black and white means then. The colour footage is quiet and almost pretty, with grass grown over the tracks and rust on the wire, and the camera keeps moving as if it were looking for something. The archive is stills and newsreel, and it does not move at all. Resnais opens the black and white with Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and Streicher, the men at the top, and then leaves them behind to show what they ordered: the arrests, the wagons, the camps going up as a construction project with plans and tenders. The cutting is the argument. Nothing is explained that a cut can show.
We were horrified, and we have seen these pictures before. It is the way Resnais holds them. A room of women’s hair. A room of spectacles. Bodies pushed by a bulldozer, filmed by the soldiers who arrived. He does not zoom in, he does not linger longer than he must, and he does not cut away early either. Bouquet’s voice stays level throughout, and that levelness is what did it to us. A narrator who raised his voice would have given us somewhere to put the feeling. This one leaves it with us.
Hanns Eisler’s score is the part people argue over, and we understand why. It is light, often a flute or a few strings, and it is sometimes almost pastoral over images that are anything but. On first viewing it can seem wrong. On second viewing it is plainly deliberate: the music refuses to tell you what to feel, in a film where telling you would be the easy thing. Cayrol’s commentary takes the same line. It is dry, at times ironic, and it catalogues the camp as if describing a town. Once or twice the irony is too neat, a well-turned French sentence sitting on top of something no sentence should sit on top of. Those are the moments the film comes closest to being writing rather than witness.
The film also says less than a modern viewer will want about who the dead were. It speaks of deportees and of nations, and it is more interested in how the machine worked than in whom it was built to kill. That is a real limit, and later films have addressed it. It does not make this one less true about what it does show.
Resnais went on to Hiroshima mon amour (1959), and the concerns are already here: how a place holds what happened in it, and how quickly the grass comes back. Set against Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), which runs for nine hours and uses no archive footage at all, this is the opposite method, and the two films need each other. Lanzmann waits for memory to speak. Resnais shows you the evidence and asks why the tourists are photographing the gate.
Watch it alone, with the lights off and nothing planned afterwards. It does not need a cinema; it needs your full attention for half an hour, which is a great deal harder to give than three hours of partial attention. Thirty-two minutes, no certificate, and you will not want to put anything else on when it is over.
