Study Guide for Week 12

Assigned Document

Alan Resnais (director) and Jean Cayrol (screenwriter) and Hanns Eisler. Night and Fog (1955; 31 minutes). Please note: Night and Fog will be screened in Benson Auditorium at 7 pm on Sunday, April 9th. It can also be screened, in diminished quality, through Sakai; if you have trouble with Sakai, please email the head of Pitzer AV, Victor Milhon-Martin.

I believe that Night and Fog is the first film (as distinct from news footage) made about what we today know as the Holocaust. As part of a number of activities observing the tenth anniversary of “the liberation” of the Nazi camps, Resnais (1922-2014) had been approached to make a documentary about the Holocaust, but he resisted doing so, thinking that such a project should be informed by the experiences he lacked of being a victim of the camps. He eventually agreed to make the film after arranging to collaborate with a camp survivor, Jean Cayrol, who had been a prisoner in the Mauthausen-Gusen camp and who wrote the screenplay for the film that Resnais directed.

The title of the film is taken from the Nazi “Nacht und Nebel” project of abductions and disappearances at the end of 1941.

Upon its release in 1955, the film had trouble being screened in public (in an era when movies could not be watched on demand at home or on whatever small device). The newly established West German state convinced France to withdraw the film from competition at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. The film also waited four years before being publicly screened in the U.S. In both cases, this resistance to screenings of the film reflected that at this moment in the Cold War, the project of forging Western unity against the Soviet bloc was in tension with public memorialization of the Holocaust.

After making Night and Fog, Resnais was then approached to make a documentary about the dropping of the atomic bomb on civilian populations in Japan. This project also was conducted in a collaborative way, with Resnais’s stipulation being that it had to involve Japanese and French actors, crews, and locations. The finished product is Hiroshima Mon Amor (“Hiroshima, My Love”); it is a film that is not easily recognizable as documentary or, perhaps, anything else. I have not assigned this film but urge you to watch it.

It’s interesting to note that there have been numerous other films, many of them even good films and a few of them even great films, made about the Holocaust—but very few films, other than Hiroshima Mon Amor, have been made about the Hiroshima (and/or Nagasaki)—and I cannot at this moment think of any other great film on this historical tragedy.

When you screen Night and Fog, please listen attentively to the music.

Study Guide Questions

1. After watching the film, think about its 31 minute length. One of the other most celebrated documentaries about the Holocaust is Claude Lanzman’s Shoah, which runs 566 minutes (yes, more than nine hours). And most mainstream movies run for about 100 minutes, roughly. Here is the question: what do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of Resnais’s decision to make a relatively short documentary about the Holocaust?

2. What if anything did you think about the Holocaust, during or after screening “Night and Fog,” that was different from any thoughts about the Holocaust you previously had? Explain.

3. What do you make of (or how do you understand) the film’s ending commentary about the present? (Think about which “present” or “presents” you think the commentary applies to.)

4a. What do you make of the film’s use of both black-and-white and color footage?

4b. What do you make of the film’s music and the pairing of music with images? (It’s very hard to use words to write about music, so this is a harder question than it might seem, but see what you can do with it.)

5. Pick any moment of the film you want to discuss, noting the words of the narration and the visuals (you can use Sakai to go back and get the details after you screen the film in its entirety).