A right-ward track across the now-abandoned remnants of a concentration camp simultaneously models and critiques the encounter between the roving detective-camera, searching for the trace of history, and the trauma of the past that exposes itself, lying in wait to the perceptually attentive. Just as the film’s narrator remarks that there are “no images of the past,” seemingly resigning us to a doomed present sequestered off from a past stranded in history, the camera is suddenly intercepted, even assaulted, by the sudden shock of the black-and-white “documentary” image. History, the film suggests, insists on being heard.

Yet if the images we see construct a contrast between the moving color present and the grayscale truth dormant beneath, and thus rely on and seem to affirm the journalistic equation of black-and-white with both the past and the “real,” these sights also trouble the very argument they seem to be founding. Shots of marching Nazis intervene in and fulfill the camera’s search for a “real past” only to, in turn, question that very fulfillment, insofar as these images are themselves mediated by their presence in another film. Our first introduction to “the past” is actually an image from Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous 1933 propaganda film Triumph of the Will presented, by this film, as a document of history. Our engagement with the past, the film seems to remark, is already shot-through with its own slipperiness.

It is thus that director Alain Resnais’ seemingly straightforward documentary about the necessity of memory reveals itself as a meditation on the difficulty of history. In these opening moments, 1955’s epochal Night and Fog cuts together three exploratory images, “stitching” various rightward tracks (from different concentration camps) into both an existential demand for engaging the remnants of the past and a reminder of the difficulty of parsing that past and piecing it together. The film suggests the need to capture an ephemeral totality more substantial, and more impossible, than any one camp’s empirical reality. It asks what image – if any – truly indexes the gravity of the Holocaust. The film’s deepest and thorniest conundrum is how to treat the past as at once a necessary shock of light for the audience and an ambiguous shadow stalking that very light.

The rightward track in the “present” cuts three times in motion to hem together multiple concentration camps, and the footage from Triumph of the Will immediately again cuts three times in motion as the Nazis march forward into the camera, such that they appear to “stutter” forward, as if piercing the frame into the present, molesting the innocent present with their presence in the film’s, and our, current day. The film does not equate the camera’s gaze with Nazism, but it does raise the specter of a more all-encompassing sense of historical blame, one in which the audience is culpable for eliding the memory of the past and remaining divested of the shaping influence of history. Searching for the truth of the Nazi’s crimes awaiting revelation in the camp, the film suggests, implicates the viewer and the camera in this history, an argument that the film will constellate and reconstellate throughout. The would-be detective’s search culminates not in a “total picture” of a “closed” past event but a leakage of the past into the present and the co-presence of the present in the past.

These are the terms of Resnais’ argument, growing more slippery and less stable by the second of this half-hour wake of a film. During a famous shot of thousands of blonde-haired scalps piled up in the concentration camps, initially glimpsed in close-up, the camera tracks back and pans up to confront an overwhelming and unfathomable mountain that the frame cannot contain, a monument to human depravity and the violence of efficiency and commodification that is also a reminder of cinema’s own ambivalent ability to depict these horrors which, the film reminds us, necessarily exceed the frame. The shot’s “beauty” is often suggested, and in turn rebuffed, by critics, but the aesthetic “radiance”of the blonde hair coupled with the camera’s inability to “see” all the hair in one shot both visualizes (and fails to visualize) the inability of the camera to fully showcase the horrors of the war. If most war films impress the devastation of their contents on the viewer, Night and Fog insists on the existential uncertainty of its own capacity to acknowledge the history that constructs it.

Perhaps as importantly, it invites us to meditate on the reality that this hair was used – and sold – for aesthetic and utilitarian purposes. The shot of the hair resonates with earlier and later moments in the film that suggest consumer catalogues, whether the various different watchtowers (as the narrator remarks on their various “styles”) or the later moment where an SS Officer’s wife’s home life is contrapuntally, almost ironically, placed in relief against the devastation around her: she “does her part to keep up a respectable family life, just like in any other garrison town,” “though perhaps she’s just a bit more bored” remarks the narrator. Violence, Arendt reminded us long ago, is depressingly banal, quotidian, yes, but also micromanaged and enacted on a daily basis. Recurrently, the film compares the concentration camps to mid-century cities, engines of modernity rather than beacons of a past form of violence no longer applicable to civilization. The film foregrounds this connection, ironizing the camp with grave severity, turning “aestheticization” into something like a self-critical gesture that implicates the film in its own imaging while suggesting that cinema can never truly exist outside the very technological space which produced the wretched humanity it films.  The film, Jay Cantor remarks, establishes a relationship between “death and the image” itself. Violence, he argues, forms the basis of the film, and of its capacity to resist that violence by drawing attention to it and art’s complicity in it.

Deeply invested in the materiality of the past – we’re forced to confront soap coagulated from human remains, drawings written on human flesh, charred bodies and scratches in the walls – Resnais nonetheless sketches the molecular connections between the corporeal experiences in the camp and the historical amnesia that helps perpetuate modernity’s violence. The violent events become a singularity: particular but not, perhaps, wholly unique, an unfathomable intensification of the latent violence of the modern world. Machine-assisted genocide and aesthetic violence, the film implies, are co-constituent weapons of a modernity. Rather than an aberrant mistake, the film treats the Holocaust as a kind of modern apotheosis, not “Europe gone mad” but the logical conclusion of its contradictions. The camps are “built the way a stadium or a hotel is built,” by “businessman, estimates, competitive bids” and “architects (who) calmly design the gates meant to be passed through only once,” the narrator reminding us that these are the projects of bureaucrats rather than demons, “clowns” as well as “monsters,” to use Arendt’s terms. These international capitalist constructions weigh on the film as heavily as the German past. The film exposes not only a single tragedy to “remember,” bounded and contained, easily catalogued and rendered knowable, but an ongoing engine of industrial capitalism. Spectral images from the past double as the skeleton of the present and do not conveniently demarcate themselves to the temporalities we may desire to contain them in.

If the catalogue-like images evoke a hyper-consciousness about viewing and being viewed, about the curation and construction of this cinematic experience, then the narrator’s (infamously) jaunty, somewhat ironically clipped vocal style, coupled with the somewhat genteel music, of almost muzak-like obliviousness at times, bestow the wretched images with a contrapuntal, mid-century-chic banality.The narrator remarks that “a crematorium from the outside can look like a picture postcard,” “today tourists have their snapshots taken in front of them,” and “nothing disguised the crematorium from an ordinary block.” More directly, with regard to cinema, the “only visitor now is the camera” but “we can but show you the outer shell, the surface,” as the narrator remarks; “no description, no image can reveal their true dimension.”

Still, the images don’t leave, and the narration works with the past rather than dismissing it as inaccessible or necessarily corrupted by violence’s capacity to aestheticize. Theodor Adorno, famously, wrote that there can be no “poetry after Auschwitz,” and yet Night and Fog insists on both the complicity and necessity of poetry (as Cantor also argues, although not with reference to Adorno). Rather than the classical Hollywood style (which foregrounds its own access to space and tends to hide/obfuscate only to later reveal and empower the viewer to “access”), Resnais’ modernist style is more self-conscious about its own subject position and distinctly does not presume uncomplicated access to its image-objects. It is no less assured about the critical purchase of the camera itself, nor of its ethical value. After the narrator reminds us that the guard posts were metaphorical high grounds that were created to observe and detect prisoners, the guard posts become our best view of the present camp when the camera positions itself in one “searching for traces of the corpses” around it. In a less overt moment, the narrator remarks on the terror sleeping prisoners felt from the “sudden appearance of the SS, zealous in their check-ups and inspections’” while itself panning across the beds for a camera inspection of their trace. In the tower, the camera pans over the landscape, the four vertical beams holding up the tower cutting into the pan (dissecting the frame) and vicariously framing the guard-post as scouring windows and screens, facsimiles of the film frame: both a window that views the exterior world and a camera that frames that world in particular ways or cuts into the world to expose/enhance portions of it. As the film concludes, the narrator asks “who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners” and “are their faces really different from our own?”.  We are tasked with reappropriating technologies of vision and maintenance for humane ends while also recognizing how the boundary between humanity and inhumanity must always be reinvestigated.

Resnais’ Night and Fog turns the poetic realism of French cinema in the late ‘30s and ‘40s inward and underground, digging at the base and pondering its own elisions and omissions. The film models the point in cinema where the camera detective teeters on the brink of its own impossibility and failure, about to dive into a future from which certainty is entirely circumspect. In the coming years, we’d get Godard’s cynical juke box, Fellini’s baroque carnivalesque, Antonioni’s wayward house of mirrors, not to mention Resnais’ own deeply disturbing explorations of ghostly modernist woe. Night and Fog anticipates the ethereal field Resnais would establish in his narrative follow-up Hiroshima, mon Amour, which started life as a similar documentary demanding remembrance and then seeped into a reminder of how difficult remembering truly is. In anticipating (some of) those films within a documentary framework, Night and Fog demands that we always try to access truth, even as the film forces us to reckon with our perpetual distance from it, placing us in the hold of an apparent paradox called modernity, a murky swamp that is both far thicker and far more thin than we may want to imagine.

Score: 10/10