Warning: This film, using new color footage and old black and white footage from concentrations camps, can be a very difficult film to view because of its graphic nature.
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Night and Fog: At the Intersections of Cinema and History
Warning: This film, using new color footage and old black and white footage from concentrations camps, can be a very difficult film to view because of its graphic nature.
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Night and Fog told a silent story of the Holocaust. Yet the film was not devoid of making the viewer feel very strong and powerful emotions. The background music in this movie was at times extremely unsettling and evoked anxiety in the viewer. The Holocaust was a historical tragedy, and the crescendo of the music and rhythm for this documentary turn what was already terrifying and frightening into something of a horror film. Cinema creates this drama and adds aesthetic qualities such as the quiet scenes of the green concentration camps that although empty and dreary in the present, are just shown very simply and in a matter of fact way. Much of the time when the camera returns to these solemn scenes of color, the audience somehow has a calming feeling like the worst is over and in the past. The film is mostly presenting the environment and setting of the concentration camp and not exactly looking at the individual stories of Jews and providing any sort of voice for those that were victimized by the holocaust. I found this portrayal to expose the Holocaust for what it was and maybe even induce more reaction from the movement of the scenes, the cutting from archival footage to color footage, and the utilization of the music. Cinema tends to add more of a spectacle to the historical story and caters toward the eyes of the beholder and the reaction the piece will induce.
ReplyDeleteNight and Fog appears to have elements of both the poetic and expository modes. With the expository mode, the film is informational in a visual way with what the concentration camps appeared to be and what occurred inside, including for example images of how the corpses were buried, the gas chambers that looked like brick ovens, and the images of the collection of hair, glasses, skulls, etc. in order to illustrate the historical accuracy. The poetic mode is clearly shown as well where actual people, places, and things are depicted, but there isn’t any acknowledgement of individualism. This film also is expressive and meant to be affective by the use of the graphic black and white clips and stills of people dying and suffering in these torture chambers, along with the Nazis clearly being shown to be the ones who were inflicting this pain. However, the music especially provides for this gloomy, dreary, ominous, and sad tone that the filmmaker wishes the viewer to feel throughout the work.
Alain Resnais’s film, Night and Fog, offers an unsettling depiction of the atrocities that occurred during the holocaust. Lacking a vocal narration, Resnais uses solely images, film and music to illustrate the horrible events that occurred during this time period. Using Nichol’s modes of documentary, I would describe the film as using the poetic mode. The footage and music was fashioned to illicit specific emotions from the audience. Filmed only a decade after World War II ended, the film footage flips back and forth between the present day ruins of concentration camps and actual footage from the events of the holocaust. Somber and eerie music accompanies the images of the concentration camp ruins, while more intense frightening music is used when displaying footage of Nazi soldiers. Nichols describes poetic modes of film as “stressing visual and acoustic rhythms, patterns and the overall form of the film.” The poetic mode focuses less on individual stories of social actors in a film. Instead the people illustrated in the film simply become part of the whole lyrical depiction. Nichols explains that the poetic mode, “stresses mood, tone and affect much more than displays of actual knowledge or acts of rhetorical persuasion” (162). By using the poetic mode and including no voice or narration, Resnais does not enforce a certain “point of view,” but rather the images simply speak for themselves. Nichol’s also explains that, “the documentary dimension to the poetic mode of representation stems largely from the degree to which modernist films relied on the historical world for their source material” (163). Resnais clearly relied heavily on historical footage for this film.
ReplyDeleteLooking from a social justice lens, there remains a complex relationship between cinema and history. Cinema is used as a medium for entertainment and it often shapes the way we look back at historical events. I think specifically of war movies that often glorify past events of war. Cinema is made to illicit feelings for a present day audience even though the events may be historical and have already occurred. Part of this complicated relationship is the fact that the present day filmmaker has the ability to shape historical events in a particular way.
This film is constructed using both poetic and expository methods, though the images were taken by a "fly on the wall." The film of the train being packed with Jewish people wearing yellow stars lingers on the structure of the train and not as much the people being packed in. This emphasizes the tool of industry and "progress" over the lives of the people that have just, for the most part, ended.
ReplyDeleteThe train connects to the factories, another (infra)structural symbol that exemplifies the attitude toward death during the holocaust. Human lives were reduced to their materiality, like products, and unsuitable ones that according to hitler and his crew could not be redeemed. This is the lead in to industrial capitalist society, the future that the train is moving toward filled with people left for dead. The reason this moving image in parallel with the desolate fields strewn with houses is so terrifying is because we know that there is no returning to the world before the factories and the trains, that pastoral landscape the color images depict so well. The reason why it is such a genius poetic decision to pan over the land in color after showing the industrial process in black and white is that it shows how the land contains its history, and although it may look written over with green, the horrifying black and white images that are interspersed show that the memory is alive, much like a series of ptsd flashbacks. This film does not seem to show real life. This can't be real.
That's why I think the film has a complicated relationship with social justice, because it shows images that a possibly complicit photographer and documenter took. There were many complicit documenters during the holocaust, and I believe they are implicated in the crimes they witnessed. Though the images strung together are meant to expose tragedy, it's is ultimately poetic and not participatory.
The images form a wall of history that is impossible to penetrate. Nichols might say that the observers of the events should have stepped in. But was it the filmmakers' responsibility to expose these images taken by someone or a group of people he or she might not agree with? Have they taken into account the possibility of complicity?
I would ultimately describe Night and Fog as poetic in terms of Nichols’ modes of documentary. The filmmaker, Alan Resnais, doesn’t use narration, but rather uses the music to convey “expressive…pattern and rhythm, but with the filmmaker holding a high degree of control as in the expository mode” (p. 211). The music creates tensions with its rises and falls, mimicking the tone of the images. In some ways, making this movie a silent film makes the documentary more powerful and makes the audience more emotional than a disembodied voice would have, allowing the images to speak for themselves. The juxtaposition of the colored images to the black and white images also contributes to the viewing of Night and Fog as poetic, as time and space are “discontinuous, using images that build mood or pattern without full regard for their original proximity” (p. 211). While the colored images show the empty concentration camps in the present, the black and white images parallel the same places with actual people during the Holocaust. This technique creates a powerful contrast because, in the building’s present state, it would be impossible to imagine the unspeakable horrors that occurred.
ReplyDeleteNight and Fog also speaks to the complex and complicated relationship that can exist between cinema and history. Film shapes our thoughts and memories of the past, making films like this one so important to our memory of such a significant and awful event like the Holocaust. Keeping in mind cinema’s importance to historical memory encourages filmmakers to pose some of the following questions: What are my responsibilities as a documentarian? How can I/should I represent this specific event? What points do I emphasize? There is obviously inherent subjectivity in documentary work, and filmmakers need to acknowledge their own location/point of view when considering the impact of their work on our collective historical memory.
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ReplyDeleteI would argue that Night and Fog directed by Alain Resnais (1955) primarily uses examples of expository and poetic modes, described by Bill Nichols. Although there was no narration in this documentary, it was clear that it was concerning concentration camps during the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s and the orchestral music was narration enough to communicate the filmmaker’s view of the historical tragedy. The documentarian used what Nichols calls the expository mode throughout the entirety of the film by showing images and video footage of concentration camps, jewish prisoners, and nazis, which gave the film a sense of authenticity. I could also argue that Resnais used aspects of the reflexive by switching between black and white footage of the holocaust and color footage of the aftermath, which I’m assuming is during the 1950s. As Nichols mentioned in his book “Introduction to Documentary,” filmmakers tend to blend “different models and modes to achieve a distinct result” (Nichols, p. 155) which I think holds true to Resnais’ film. Resnais is successful at adding a blend of the poetic mode by stressing “visual and acoustic rhythms, patterns, and the overall form of the film” (Nichols, p. 151). The music was calm in the beginning of the film showing the empty rows of buildings within a concentration camp, but once the trains filled with Jewish prisoners left for the camps the music got louder and menacing sounding. He also exhibited the poetic mode through the images and video footage of rows of buildings, transitioning into rows of prisoners, and rows of nazis, showing the massiveness of it all.
ReplyDeleteLooking at Night and Fog through a social justice lens, creating a film that cinematically speaks on behalf of history as a nonfiction model can bring up questions of ethics. In a sense this film could be argued as observational, but standing by and filming torture and testing areas, prisoners literally wasting away, and dead bodies being bulldozed into piles of more dead bodies of innocent people, unless being used to inform the public, is an issue of ethics. Film can create a collective memory of historical events to be circulated again and again. It is important for filmmakers to show a well-rounded view of an event when documenting social justice issues due to the fact that when an image is burned into the collective memory of a population it can be problematic.
Night and Fog combines elements of several of Nichols' documentary modes. The two most prominent are poetic and expository, with some observational. Viewers are shocked by horrible pictures and scenes of the prisoners in the concentration camps suffering beyond words. There really is not way to convey the pain through words, the filmmaker did not narrate because no words were needed, like in the observational mode. The scenes also did not involve the filmmaker or whoever captured the footage. The scenes were discontinuous like in the poetic mode to make viewers sympathize with the prisoners. This order of the scenes and the music were intentional, meant to make viewers feel the pain of the prisoners. The filmmaker also showed some concentration camps after the war and it was extremely disturbing to see them empty when the viewer knows that there used to be thousands of people there. What makes it most disturbing is that the viewer knows what happened to them, as was seen in the scenes showing the emaciation of the prisoners and the inhumane conditions into which they were forced. Like in observational, viewers may wonder what the filmmaker was thinking as the footage was taken. How did he view the people he was filming? Why didn't he do anything about what he was seeing? The film is also expository even though there is no voice over because it exposes the truth of the atrocious crimes the Nazis committed against the Jews.
ReplyDeleteCinema can be a tool for aiding in social justice causes but it can also make things more difficult. It is difficult to accurately represent history because it can never be the "now" and hence it can only be captured through old pictures, people's stories, and pieces of film that may have been taken at the time. In this case, the filmmaker exposes the horrors and social injustice that the prisoners faced, which aids in the purpose of making sure that history does not repeat itself. Often things may be taken out of context by a filmmaker so that audiences see things in a certain order of events or edited so that they misunderstand an issue. This kind of editing is not conducive to solving a social justice issue and does not present history in a true light.
Alan Resnais' documentary film Night and Fog tells without any spoken narration the horrors of the Holocaust. In addition to haunting shots of the landmarks in both old black and white and new color footage and graphic footage of the emaciated prisoners and piles of corpses, the film's score does a splendid job of telling its story and setting the tone. In fact, it is my opinion that the soundtrack does a far better job in speaking to the viewers of the atrocities committed than any vocal narration could have done. It gradually grows in ominous throughout the early portion of the film, becoming somewhat raucous by the time footage of the trains full of prisoners departing is seen. Then, as the camps are shown from inside and later out in both old and new footage, the music becomes slower and more morose. Music cues such as these lead me to consider this film an example of a poetic documentary; the film tells its story not directly but in unique and clever ways. As Bill Nichols writes in Introduction to Documentary, "This mode stresses mood, tone, and affect much more than displays of factual knowledge or acts of rhetorical persuasion." (p. 162)
ReplyDeleteWhen I observe documentaries such as this through the lens of social justice, I am reminded that film can play a vital part in determining how those who were not around when the events depicted or alluded to took place perceive what happened. Because of this, a sort of collective memory of a past event can be formed in the minds of the populace, making it imperative that the documentarian reproduce and tell the story of the events as closely and ethically as possible. It is impossible for documentarians to flawlessly preserve the past in educating the public about historical events given the innate subjectivity of documentary work. However, if proper care is not taken, history can be obfuscated or worse seriously rewritten.
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After viewing the film "Night and Fog," and subsequently being horrified by the images, I would classify this film as a poetic mode of documentary using Nichols' classification system. This is because there is really no connection between time and space as the photos and videos do not take us from exactly one moment to another, rather they skip around from one year to another and to various locations where these atrocities took place. The film also lacks a voice of authority and the only sound we experience is light music in the background. There are also a lot of images taken in color after the war in the concentration that act to bridge the gaps in time and between camps.
ReplyDeleteFrom a social justice perspective, there is most definitely a complicated lense between cinema and history. Unfortunately, cinema tends to glorify a lot of what has happened in history. At the same time, when we look at events such as the holocaust, most every person would agree that everything should be done to prevent this from happening again. It would seem that people who produce films of any kind have a responsibility to produce films that represent atrocities in a light that shows how horrible the event is to prevent events like it from ever happening again.