Night and Fog

Alain Resnais has an uneasy reputation, on one hand lauded as a director of several major films but on the other sometimes slighted as somebody who doesn't quite snap into focus as a personality. Of the key French New Wave directors, his career hasn't sparked the same continued interest as, say, Truffaut and Godard or even the recent revivals of Rivette and Rohmer. If Resnais at times seems close to becoming just a question on a final exam (match his name to "memory" if multiple choice) that's unfortunate as proven by the recent DVD release of two early films that made his reputation, Night and Fog (1955) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Both do in fact deal with memory on some level though not as some ethereal artistic idea but as something that directly affects individual and political lives. It's altogether appropriate that one of Resnais' very first films was a documentary on libraries, those repositories of our collective memory. This is apparent in Resnais' 1955 Night and Fog, which wasn't the first Holocaust documentary but in many ways was the most important until Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), which is also due soon on DVD. Resnais combined color film of the inactive concentration camps with black-and-white archival footage in ways that are familiar now but quite surprising at the time. His own fascination with memory and its effects parallels one of the key issues in Holocaust studies: How much can, or even should, be represented? This is addressed explicitly in Night and Fog even though the film takes something of an overview approach, from deportation to daily life in the camps to an ambiguous liberation. The atrocities are fully present, in visual ways that written descriptions can never quite match. With the sombre delivery of Jean Cayrol's almost poetic narration and Hans Eisler's nervous music, Night and Fog is both a stark reminder and an open warning. There's little outrage in the film but more a heartbroken sense of loss. Criterion's DVD of Night and Fog features their usual first-rate transfer of the film. Even though it runs only 31 minutes, Criterion apparently decided that any additions would be either a distraction or inappropriate and released just the solitary film (though at a lower price of $14.95). The extras are similarly sparse: There's a brief radio interview with Resnais and a set of short but worthwhile biographies of all the collaborators (which included future director Chris Marker and cinematographer Sacha Vierny). Night and Fog certainly would have benefitted from a historian's commentary or even an essay but neither are included. One worthwhile option, though, is to view the film with a music-only track which makes it easier to note Resnais' editing strategies, contrasts of screen direction, and uses of massed people and objects. By contrast, Hiroshima Mon Amour is an intimate film, featuring basically only two characters though their interactions in public spaces and various flashbacks make this anything but a theatrical dialogue. Resnais worked from a script by Marguerite Duras, one of the key writers in the Nouveau Roman movement who later became an acclaimed director (India Song). Again contributing is cinematographer Vierney, composer Georges Delerue (who did orchestrations for Night and Fog) and others. Hiroshima Mon Amour focuses on a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva in her first credited role) who goes to Hiroshima to play a nurse in a film "about peace" and has an affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada, a veteran of Naruse and Ichikawa films and later one of only two major characters in Woman in the Dunes). The temporary couple talk, plan and discard various possibilities about their future while digging out revelations from their past. This sort of thing can be parodied as "French art film" but it's important to remember that the goal isn't naturalism and it isn't the flowing dialogue that's often presumed to be observable in real life but actually isn't (Do you know anybody who talks like a Mamet or O'Neill character?). Certainly "poetry" would be a misleading word--this isn't Shakespeare either--but it does hint at the kind of heightened awareness that Resnais and Duras are attempting. This approach drives Riva and Okada to subtly understated performances that wiggle into the characters and their formation. Instead of fully formed characters presented to us, in Hiroshima Mon Amour we watch them struggle to form themselves, to define new relations without a map. But the film opens into a wider political world with the grimly unforgettable documentary footage of the Hiroshima bombing victims peppered through much of the first half-hour. The interplay of individual to society, random to intentional, language to image, and health to sickness makes this a complex sequence, the more so due to some of the footage being obvious but unmarked re-creations (undoubtedly another deliberate tactic at exploring another type of memory created by documentaries). Criterion's DVD features a sharp transfer of the film that captures the various textures and subtle lighting. Putting the film into context is an audio commentary by historian Peter Cowie, video interviews with Resnais and Emmanuelle Riva, and a version of the screenplay annotated by Duras herself. A thick booklet includes an essay by critic Kent Jones, brief Duras prose sketches, and a reprint of a 1959 roundtable discussion by the Cahiers du Cinema staff that's as insightful as it is peculiar. For more information about Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Night and Fog, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Hiroshima, Mon Amour, go to TCM Shopping. To order Night and Fog, go to TCM Shopping. by Lang Thompson