This is an excerpt of a longer piece, which you can read on IfNotNow’s Medium
If you stripped away the context of its production, Night and Fog would be a movie about infrastructure. The seminal 1955 Holocaust documentary by Alain Resnais contains throughout its short but ghost-like thirty two minutes a haunting narration by Jean Cayrol (as spoken by actor Michel Bouquet), and most of it emphasizes the literal brick-laying that paves the path towards genocide and ethnic cleansing:
A concentration camp is built like a stadium or a hotel, with contractors, estimates, bids, and no doubt a bribe or two… architects calmly conceive of gates to be passed through only once.
Resnais shows us various aesthetic styles of camps, watchtowers conceived of and only limited by the creative whims and imaginations of the Nazi architects that dream them up. Certain camps, Cayrol explains, were designed around the passions of those SS officers that had the privilege of eccentricity: one was built around one of Heinrich Himmler’s prized oak trees, while another was built with the added accoutrement of a Joseph Goebbels’ greenhouse. Goebbels, who was one of the Third Reich’s chief propagandists, probably saw no irony in making the preservation of greenery a personal passion next door to an infamous death chamber, but Resnais was a skilled enough filmmaker to point at the cruelty without so much as saying so.
Night and Fog premiered sixty-five years ago out of competition at Cannes and ten years after the camps had been liberated. The questions then for Resnais remain the same for us now, in 2021: how did this happen, and what must be done to stop it from happening again? Resnais’ answer to both questions seems to rest in the investigation of the structures and objects that calmly and coolly allowed for 9 million people to be systematically slaughtered, 6 million of which were, of course, Jews. Amongst the architectural innovations are sound proof walls to silence the screams of the prisoners and group latrines at which, Cayrol’s narration tells us, short-lived plans of prisoner resistance were hatched and forgotten.
Then there is the infrastructure of propaganda, and of deceit. At Auschwitz, the infamous sign tells us that Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Makes You Free”), while other camps feature equally deceptive slogans like Reinlichkeit ist Gesundheit (“Cleanliness is Health”) and Jedem Das Seine (“To Each His Due”). Is the latter a threat? A false hope? All of them read like magnanimously cruel and ironic versions of platitudinal inspiration, the kind seen in old doctor’s offices and school yards.
Those doctor’s offices are also part of the infrastructure of facade, as in a hospital at the camps that doesn’t heal but tortures and experiments; a brothel with no sex workers except malnourished slaves; and the trains that take unsuspecting Jews and more not to safety but to death, or worse:
The SS had built the semblance of a city with its own hospital, red-light and residential districts, and yes, even a prison… Nothing distinguished the gas chamber from a city block; Inside, a fake shower room welcomed the newcomers.
Resnais alternates between then and present day, tracing paths along empty grassy fields that have covered up the blood-soaked plains while cross-cutting with images of the worst of the atrocities. There is the infamous shot in which Resnais makes a pile of women’s hair look like an endless ocean and the more direct confrontations of survivors dragging the dead, malnourished bodies of their peers into mass graves on the day the camps were liberated; the SS officers, meanwhile, calmly clock out and head home, as if it is any other day. And what happens then? Hair is turned into cloth, bones into fertilizer, flesh into soap, skin into paper: the faux-architecture of renewal. Resnais removes any context from a striking close up of rolled up cloth, leaving the viewer to inevitably wonder if the same sadistic recycling could be in their home, too.
But Night and Fog is also a movie about memory, the ghosts of the past, and the harbingers of the ghosts of the future. Cayrol’s narration asks us about the “indifferent Autumn sky” before wondering why we walk these tracks at all. Why remind ourselves of the horrors of the past? Why do we even try to remember? The title comes from Adolf Hitler’s nacht und nebel directive to make political dissidents disappear, and in Resnais’ film of the same name an attempt is made to rescue those lost stories from behind the opaque filter of ignorance. Lingering over the entire film is a question of whether or not humanity has learned any lesson from such an incalculable tragedy. And the answer to that existentialism is found in the pieces of infrastructure that remain, tethered to abandoned camps no matter how many years pass. If you go to Majdanek, you are told that the camp is so well preserved it could be started up again in an instant, as long as someone has the political will and way. Here, in Night and Fog, empty and corroded steel ovens stand in brick casings as terrifying spectres of the crematoria they once were, minutes before Resnais shows us footage of a tractor plowing away piles of dead bodies to create a clear path; one object is a physical memorial, the other a transient memory.