Resnais in Retrospect: Memory in “Night and Fog” and “Hiroshima Mon Amour”

The camera sweeps over an idyllic country landscape to the sound of gentle music. It pans lower, revealing relics of barbed wire that shred the softness of the scene. This is not an image painted by impressionists, but the effect of time on the ghostly remains of Auschwitz in 1955, ten years after the Allied Liberation.

Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) is a documentary on concentration camps that melds color footage of an empty Auschwitz with monochromatic images of mass death that occurred in the now-vacant chambers his camera explores. It is a documentary pitting past against present, the urge to remember against the desire to forget, problematizing the relationship between the two.

 Resnais’s films are plagued with self-consciousness about their ability to portray the past. The director originally refused to create a documentary on the camps, as he felt he did not have the right to represent something he did not experience personally. It was only with Jean Cayrol’s “authentic” voice as a camp survivor that he agreed to move forward with the project. Ten years later, Resnais found himself again unable to document a trauma he did not undergo personally. To convey the horror of the atomic bomb, he sought the world of fiction and the writing of Marguerite Duras to make the unimaginable imaginable on screen.

Their collaboration became Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), the director’s first full-length film. The love story at its center became a tool for conveying the pain of traumatic memory and the conflict between remembrance and forgetting. Hiroshima Mon Amour opens with the female character listing ways she “saw”, and thus understands, the bombing of Hiroshima: newsreels, photographs, and the museum erected to commemorate the horrific event. To each assertion of knowledge or understanding, her Japanese lover replies “tu n’est rien vu”- you saw nothing. She counters in the affirmative, at one point saying “For lack of anything else as authentic as possible.” She can know the experience only in the sense that Resnais or any other human being not in Hiroshima on August 6^th, 1945 can know what took place there: through documentations and commemorations arranged and captured by others.

The films question the possibility of capturing “authentic” memory at every turn. Resnais said of the project: “what has to be filmed is the impossibility of filming it.” Hiroshima Mon Amour is a highly self-referential work: it is a film about the creation of a documentary on the atomic bomb. We see repetitions of enlarged photographs of real survivors in a recreation of a march protesting the bomb. The camera’s gaze falls upon the camera filming this march, which is, in turn, aimed back at us: Resnais’s reminder that we are only seeing what he has selected for us to see.

In Night and Fog, the controlled gaze of the camera is made even more explicit. The narrator announces: “With our sincere gaze, we survey these ruins.” The camera is not an objective lens, but a weapon in a struggle to maintain the meaning endowed in the brick walls of ovens used to incinerate human flesh. There is one scene in particular in which our attention is called to the metaphor of seeing: a still photograph of gaunt prisoners survey their liberators from behind a fence. The central prisoner has a bandaged eye. The narrator reads: “They see without understanding.” If those who lived through the camps cannot conceive of what they went through, how could anyone who watches the films of Resnais hope to understand the horrors of the past he represents?

Despite the physical existence of gas chambers scratched by human fingernails and photographs of beheaded bodies shown in Night and Fog, the narrator maintains “No description, no images, can reveal their true dimension- pure, unmediated horror.” It is in the combination of words proclaiming their own futility and that of the moving images before us that the horror of the camps is conveyed, preserving the memory of what transpired so the world may never forget: “the barracks are abandoned by all but the camera…there is no longer any footsteps but are own.”

While Hiroshima Mon Amour is the story of an intensely personal memory, Nuit et Brouillard steps back to show a collective memory of trauma, albeit a version of what historian Henry Rousso calls “Resistancialisme,” or united French resistance to the occupation. The documentary’s title references the Night and Fog decree issued by the German occupiers, who rounded up political prisoners in the dark of night without notifying loved ones. The narrator does not differentiate between the fates of the 80,000 Jewish and the 115,000 political prisoners deported from France to very different German concentration camps. The word “Jew” is not even mentioned in the English subtitles of the film.

We are, however, told that 3,000 Spaniards- Republican prisoners of the Spanish Civil War- died building the steps at Maltheusen. The victims shown are French, Poles, Spanish; the only indication of the targeting of Jews is the presence of stars sewn onto the clothing of people boarding cattle cars. The stars are not explained or mentioned by the narrator; how long before no one knows what they signified? In trying to make his film applicable as a commentary on the war for Algerian independence (which was being waged at the time of the film’s release), Resnais generalized atrocities to universalize his message of the horror of forgetting the past.  Resnais’s documentary powerfully salvages a collective memory of European victimhood, while the memory of Jewish genocide is repressed, left to crumble along with the bricks.

In Hiroshima Mon Amour the concept of a unified national identity is shot through by one woman’s personal trauma set in opposition to national memory. The female protagonist recalls the day of French liberation with horror, not joy, and cannot share her pain with the society around her. She must travel to Hiroshima, the sight of another trauma, to encounter someone who will understand her pain. The protagonists in Hiroshima Mon Amour are never named- they name each other for their respective sites of traumatic memory- she is forever “Nevers,” he, “Hiroshima.” Their respective traumas can only find understanding across barriers of national origin. “History, like the trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s trauma.” For Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour, like the faux documentary within it, is meant not a French film, “c’est internationnel.” The trauma of the atomic bomb, conveyed in the context of the trauma of lost love, is made to resonate across national boundaries.

Both films note the passage of time through indicators of regeneration: Elle’s hair, shorn off to shame her for loving an enemy, grows back; the plants in Hiroshima sprout from radiated earth and the flowers grow between the tracks that bore prisoners to Auschwitz. While these images could be represented as signs of healing, Resnais presents them as catalysts in the process of forgetting. It is this erosion over time that feeds the fear, present in both films, that traumatic past will be forgotten.

Freud wrote of the traumatized patient in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through that “we must treat his illness, not as an event of the past, but as a present-day force.” Both of Resnais’s films address past traumas as events to be worked through and faced in the present. The inspiration for making the bomb a backdrop for a love story in Hiroshima Mon Amour came while Duras and Resnais sat sipping tea, while Resnais noted that “bombardiers are flying over our planet- and our conversation, ready to drop more atomic bombs and meanwhile we haven’t altered our external behavior to any great extent.” A similar sense of the eerie suppression of the past infiltrating the present is expressed in the closing moments of Night and Fog: “Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn off the arrival of the new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own? Somewhere in our midst, lucky kapos still survive…There are those who refused to believe, or believed only for a brief moment.” While many of those falling into the categories of perpetrator and victim were trying to move on with their lives in the 1950s when his film was first released, his message has not lost any of its poignancy. Resnais reminds us there is never a neat, clean cleavage with the past. It still walks among us- or circles overhead, as the case may be: “We pretend it all happened only once at a given time and place. We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us, and a deaf ear to humanity’s never-ending cry.”

French historian Pierre Nora writes of physical locations having the power to commemorate, while in that very act, contributing to the historicization of past events, breaking them off from the present: “These lieux de memoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it.” This is the problem posed by the tourists taking photographs in front of gas chambers in Night and Fog, of the miniature mushroom cloud souvenirs shown in Hiroshima Mon Amour.

At the close of Elle’s revelation of her love for the German soldier in Hiroshima Mon Amour, lui responds: “I’ll think of this story as the horror of forgetting.” The films of Resnais are but this: stories conveying the horror of memories fading into the past even by virtue of being told.

Tags: French film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Memory, Night and Fog, Resnais

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Film & Theatre, The Francophile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.