Re-envisioning the Postwar Documentary: Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour

Despite the reputation that Alain Resnais has garnered as “cinema’s definitive artist of postwar trauma,” few scholars have undertaken a detailed comparative analysis of his two works that broach this subject: Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour.1 Together, these films transformed the postwar documentary through their impulse to dismantle the dominant “realist” mode that offered transparent, conclusive, and morally reassuring accounts of historical trauma. Remarking that the many films made about Hiroshima and the Holocaust did not seem to have a very striking effect on people, Resnais undertook what he called “formal experiments,” which would unsettle the spectator through abrupt flashbacks, emotional estrangement, and self-reflexive commentaries on the inadequacy of the documentary in reconstructing these tragedies. Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour thus reflect on their representational limits while provoking a meditation that exceeds them – a sensibility that profoundly connects them in their reconception of the historical documentary in the postwar era.

The Past in the Present

A fundamental principle linking Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour is their conception of the traumatic past as an enduring reality that lurks in the present. This is starkly different from typical postwar documentaries, which tend to treat the past as a closed narrative and static reality sealed off from the world of the spectator. Through highly constructed montage and dialogue, Resnais’s two films bring past and present together in sudden flashes that haunt us with the realization that historical trauma can never be laid to rest. They suggest an inescapable condition underlying traumatic memory, whose fragments – when unleashed from their temporal constraints – will return to rupture a present that has not consciously integrated them.

In Night and Fog, the most brutal interruption of the repressed past takes place in the opening sequence, when the “sound” of our footsteps in an abandoned present-day camp is overtaken by the stampede of the Nazi rally.2 With this raw resurgence of repressed memory, the film shatters the notion that the Holocaust can be thought of as past. The voice-over – “grass now covers the ground where the prisoners once walked, the current no longer passes through the barbwire fences . . .” – is belied by an invisible essence of trauma that endures and which it knows it cannot contain, as it lapses into an unsettling silence that coincides with the camera’s unsteady panning.

The opening sequence is distinctly marked by this mounting tension between the façade of a calm present and the ultimate encounter with the repressed past that lurks just beneath it. Resnais’s camerawork subtly traps us inside the inevitability of this confrontation, as he pans from left to right three times to reveal the watchtower hovering at the edge of the frame and situates us between two barbwire fences converging toward the tower as the evasive narration comes to its disturbing conclusion, “A peaceful landscape . . . an ordinary field with crows flying over it . . . an ordinary road . . . an ordinary village . . . this is the way to a concentration camp.”3

The image of the watchtower is repeated three times during the film’s opening sequence.

Rather than looking upon the so-called alternate universe of the camps, Night and Fog insinuates that the architecture of these horrors is still in our midst. “The film does not speak of the war in terms of finality,” writes David Carter, “but instead states that war is merely asleep right now, rather than finished.”4 Resnais has taken the image of the empty watchtower, often used in documentaries as a symbol of Allied victory and of a definitive end to the horrors of the camps, and turned it into a disquieting warning: that as long as France’s collaboration remained repressed in its collective memory, it would lie in wait, poised to rupture the illusion of an undisturbed present.

In Hiroshima mon amour, the fragments of traumatic memory are also unleashed as the repressed past saturates the present to the breaking point. As the French woman talks about Hiroshima’s tragedy, it becomes increasingly impossible for her to conceal the repressed memories of her suffering in Nevers. In this way, as Resnais himself said, Nevers and Hiroshima coexist in the film, creating a temporal flux that causes the French woman to relive her past trauma and reopens the wounds of an overpowering memory that leaves her haunted and alienated in the present.

This simultaneity attains its critical point in the café, where the traumatic telling of Nevers takes place. During this sequence, Resnais alternates as many as sixteen times between past and present within a span of less than three minutes.5 This has the effect of reducing both past and present – Nevers and Hiroshima – to a pile of visual fragments, which are fused through Resnais’s rapid free-form cutting to create fleeting, evocative links between the two. The most startling is the match cut between the image of Elle as she clutches her mother and the image of her clinging to Lui as she relives her agony. This produces an exact transposition of past and present that recreates Elle’s inability to distinguish between the two, as she slips into the paralyzing eternity of her trauma.

Resnais also uses these stark cuts to create “irrational intervals that allow time in the pure state to rise up from the surface of the screen.”6 This effect is palpable right as Elle begins to relive Nevers, clutching her head as the camera rapidly cuts to the body of her German lover next to a pile of crumbling bricks, before making another cut only seconds later, back to the present, where she is frozen in the same pose. This sequence stylistically amplifies her incomprehension, connecting the shots so that she appears to be staring wordlessly into a chasm of traumatic memory. By zooming in on her petrified figure, the camera also evokes the inexorability of her confrontation with this memory that overwhelms yet eludes her. With technical artistry, Resnais has recreated Marguerite Duras’s vision of non-cathartic drama, where the French woman’s miserable miming of her tragedy can only amount to a failure to recapture the past and will inevitably leave her with a sense of having betrayed her memory through speech.

Resnais’s highly stylized montage makes it appear as if Elle is staring into the abyss of her past.

We see this as she returns to the ironically named hotel, New Hiroshima, where she accuses herself of having forgotten the German. Her sense of time and place radically unravel, jumping from self-condemnation in the present – “I betrayed you with this stranger” – to bitter nostalgia – “In Nevers, when she was young, she had a German lover” – to the perpetual illusion that reunites her with the German – “We’ll go to Bavaria, my love.”7) The breakdown of past and present has irreversibly shattered her identity.

We also see this as she wanders through the city in a reprise of her traumatic monologue, with looming images of Nevers now bluntly intruding on what was – at the film’s beginning – an uninterrupted, almost hypnotic panning of Hiroshima. As Resnais alternates with metronomic detachment between Hiroshima and Nevers, he recreates the confusion of past and present that marks the French woman’s deeply troubled and alienated condition. In the final scene, we feel the acute disparity between the intact surfaces of the hotel room and the devastation of time, memory, and identity underneath. There is also a precipitate onset of oblivion and the sense that the woman’s past, like an ungraspable vision, will haunt and propel her in a destructive cycle of reenacting her trauma. As it leaves her lips in trembling syllables, “Hi-ro-shi-ma” is reminiscent of the eternal cry evoked in the final line of Night and Fog – trauma splintered beyond the bounds of time and place to which we pretend to confine it.

Disrupted Identification

By resisting narrative closure and catharsis, Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour self-consciously alienate the spectator. With a “spine of modernist steel,” they refuse the principles of Aristotelian dramaturgy, which stipulates that dramatic representation should be made accessible to the audience through the credibility of illusion and the depth of emotional identification.8

Night & Fog uses techniques of estrangement that are stark and highly unsettling, severing the viewer’s identification with Holocaust victims and producing raw encounters with traumatic images that are cinema’s equivalent of an electric shock. Hiroshima mon amour, meanwhile, adopts a more ambivalent approach to alienating its audience, using a mix of Brechtian and illusionist techniques that seeks to prevent the viewer’s total identification with Hiroshima victims rather than deny it altogether.9 By mediating Hiroshima through Elle’s trauma in Nevers, the film appears to offer a microcosm for identifying with its tragedy, all while disrupting it through the glaring incongruity that serves as its premise: the attempt to relate Hiroshima to a fictional narrative. The film thus sustains an affective but inauthentic link that ultimately traps us inside this profound disparity, so that in its final moments, as Elle and Lui are locked in an uncomprehending stare, we experience an emotional and critical awareness of our failure – and cinema’s failure – to grasp Hiroshima.

Unlike Hiroshima mon amour, where Elle’s emotionally charged presence erects a counterpoint to the camera’s cold gaze, Night and Fog’s narrator is atonal and detached, undermining the spectator’s desire to find an element of human redemption within the Nazi machine. “The voiceover,” writes Philip Lopate, “is delivered in a harsh, astringent tone, filled with ironic shadings. The magnificent score by Eisler is also employed ironically: the lovely, lyrical flute passages collide with the harrowing images.”10

In the sequence describing the prisoners’ resistance inside the camps, this irony is trenchant; the redemptive narrative is blatantly contradicted not only by the voice-over’s dispassionate tone but also by the incongruous images that appear on the screen. As we are told, “The prisoners’ thoughts turn to God. They keep their dreams alive,” we see a pile of scribbled notes, containing nothing but lists of food. When the voice-over says that the prisoners “take care of those who are worse off,” we see a dying prisoner alone on the ground. His pose, moreover, corresponds to the King David statue from the beginning of the sequence, when the voice-over proclaims, “Man is incredibly resilient” – another disjunctive point accentuating the absurdity of this humanizing narrative.11

That Night and Fog is a raw response to the “realist” documentary and its moral reassurance is also brutally evident in the hospital sequence. Resnais surgically alters and undermines the very same footage that appears in Billy Wilder’s Death Mills, where an Allied doctor comes to examine a prisoner’s arm as she pulls back her sleeve, supplanting his arrival by a jarring close-up of a prisoner’s skeletal legs. As if unearthing a corpse, Resnais has ripped open the facile narrative of an Allied rescue to expose the horrific, dehumanized shards underneath, devastating the possibility of emotional catharsis.

Resnais’s use of Death Mill footage alienates the spectator and disrupts his emotional response.

Hiroshima mon amour produces a viewing experience that is less emotionally detached than Night and Fog. It attains what Bertolt Brecht considered the ideal equilibrium between engagement and estrangement, or the maximum critical distance from its own representation without precluding the spectator’s emotional involvement.12 Despite the irony that the French woman’s personal tragedy is fictional and in no way comparable with the bombing, we are drawn in as she reenacts her past, and we begin to see the story of Nevers as a potential analogy for recapturing Hiroshima’s collective trauma. “The film,” Robert Stam writes, “conjures away the danger of placing the innumerable deaths of Hiroshima up against the invented story of a single love by carefully constructing links between these two incommensurate stories.”13

These links appear immediately and are subconsciously reinforced as the film unfolds. The image of hands is repeated eight times in the opening sequence, creating strong resonance between the mutilated hand of a Hiroshima victim and the contorted shape of Elle’s hand as she grips the Japanese man. Her incantatory voice fuses her past and Hiroshima’s in a single, obscure realm of traumatic experience. Narrative details also play on our desire to see connections. Elle’s lover was shot the same day her town was liberated; for the rest of the world, Hiroshima’s devastation meant the end of the war. Elle arrives in Paris, “recovered” from her loss, only to encounter a torrent of images of Hiroshima in the news, causing her to relapse into her traumatized state. The strangeness of comparing these two stories dissipates as visual, linguistic, and dramatic cues seduce us into seeing and feeling Hiroshima through the eyes of the French woman.

The camera, however, never fully indulges this perspective. It is always split between Elle’s gaze and a separate ironic gaze that is highly skeptical of her emotional connection with Hiroshima. This is what prevents us from experiencing total identification with the French woman and what gives the film its self-reflexive distance, allowing us to arrive at a more critical judgment of Elle’s presence in Hiroshima. We gradually see how Hiroshima is a façade behind which she can relive and sacralize her own tragedy. As the screen fades out on the river Ota and returns to the two lovers in the hotel, there is a brief instant where Elle’s hand seems to grip not only Lui’s back but also the edges of the river, strewn with the same crumbling bricks that were next to the German soldier when she found him dead. Beneath her impassioned descriptions of Hiroshima, she is clinging to an entirely disparate memory.

The Japanese man senses this, and when he forces her to speak directly of Nevers, their underlying estrangement from one another becomes more apparent. The visual composition of the scenes mirrors this growing distance. As Elle offers the first fragments of her story, the screen slowly dissolves onto a street in Nevers, with the silhouette of the German soldier symbolically interposing between her and Lui. As she recounts her trysts with the German next to the ruins, the camera fades so that Lui’s imposing figure merges with the crumbling stone structure, evoking the irony that despite the enormity of Hiroshima’s tragedy, it has been foregrounded by the fictional story of Nevers and turned into a mere landscape for the haunted projections of Elle’s memory.

Lui’s incorporation into Elle’s tragedy is belied by their growing estrangement from one another.

However, when Elle attempts to fully incorporate Lui into her story of Nevers, addressing him as if he were her dead German lover, he refuses, slapping her across the face. This moment represents the film’s turning point: Elle’s identification with Hiroshima, tenuously sustained until that point, has been shattered. The rest of the film traces her mounting alienation from Lui and her empty presence in Hiroshima. The film’s visual landscape is no longer marked by their entwinement but by their division. As Lui follows Elle through the city – she in glaring white, he in the dark shadows – we have the impression of two haunted beings moving in parallel.

When they return to the hotel, the camera makes it look as if they were not in the same room; the doorframe starkly divides them, again highlighting her pale figure against Lui’s darkened form. Elle’s broken identification with Hiroshima culminates in their final exchange, as they stare uncomprehendingly at one another and utter the names of their traumas in fragmented syllables. Significantly, the final word is “France,” reminding us that our only link to Hiroshima in the film has been the French woman, who, as Lui reiterated in the opening sequence, saw nothing. If Resnais, however, had fixated on Elle’s absence from Hiroshima, he would have arrived at the same impasse as Night and Fog: the futility of trying to reconstruct an event that was never witnessed. Instead, he created a film that juxtaposes the desire to identify with Hiroshima’s tragedy with the critical awareness that it would be impossible to do so authentically.

The Limits of the Documentary

Resnais’s visual and poetic fragmentation, which heightens the emotional devastation of Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour, also produces a documentary form that is profoundly aware of its limits in portraying history. As Jacques Rivette once said, “Fragmentation operates on two levels in Resnais’s films. First, on the level of content, of dramatization. Then, I think even more importantly, on the level of cinema itself.”14 Both Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour disrupt the transparency of normalized documentary representations by calling attention to their own constructions and self-reflexively conflating fragments of fact and fiction.

Resnais’s resistance to an expository narrative of the Holocaust is evident in his refusal of the initial project that was proposed to him. Originally, historians Henri Michel and Olga Wormser had envisioned Night and Fog as an extension of an exposition they were organizing on the Resistance and deportation in France.15 Resnais, however, refused to pursue the project unless a camp survivor was involved. He turned to Mauthausen survivor Jean Cayrol, whose Poems of Night and Fog would serve as the film’s politically and metaphorically charged title, which evokes not only the Nazi edict under which Cayrol was persecuted, but also France’s postwar obfuscation of its involvement in Holocaust atrocities. Rather than using the archival materials to elucidate history, they would weave them into a complex and disturbing visual essay on the obscurity of the Holocaust in collective memory.

The most startling way in which Resnais’s film undermines documentary realism is by drawing attention to cinema’s failure to represent Holocaust atrocities. “No description, no shot can restore their true dimension,” the voice-over tells us as the camera passes like an oneiric eye through the empty barracks of the present. “Night and Fog is, in effect, an anti-documentary,” writes Philip Lopate, an apt description given the contrast between the expository mode of typical documentaries and the poetic impenetrability of Night and Fog.16 In Billy Wilder’s Death Mills, we see an Allied soldier approach the gas chambers and open the door as the voice-over explains, “Inside the shower bath, the gas vents; on the ceiling, the dummy shower heads; push buttons to control inflow and outflow of gas; a hand valve to regulate pressure.”17

Resnais’s film, by contrast, does not expose the horror but obstructs our vision while suggesting it, panning across the surface of the gas chambers, as it merely says, “The doors were closed. A watch was kept.”18 Rather than supplying this gap in collective memory through a “realistic” restaging or description, Night and Fog makes us disturbingly aware of what we cannot possibly know or envision.

At other moments, we are separated from “the Real” without knowing it, when Resnais incorporates what appear to be genuine archives but are actually segments of fiction or propaganda films. Significantly, this is the case with the first flashback, taken from a Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Here, Resnais suggests the staging that belies documentary representation; the camera never merely records history but also recreates it through a particular, distorted gaze.

Most historical documentaries, however, can easily dissimulate these elements of subjectivity and artificiality, as Resnais’s film later implies with its insertion of Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage and its reenactment of the deportation. Through meticulous montage, which inserts the clip just after real deportation footage, this segment takes on an exceptionally realistic and convincing quality. Formal details create continuity across the two segments, linking them through the disturbingly melodious soundtrack, through the “passage” from day to night, and through the narration: “Death makes its first cut” as we see the train depart and “then its second” as the “same” train arrives. We see the extreme finesse of Night and Fog’s anti-documentary approach, which reflects on the manipulation behind documentary realism and on the inability of collective memory to distinguish between what is real and what is staged.

The opening sequence of Hiroshima mon amour also presents an amalgamation of archive and fiction that deeply undermines our ability to visually isolate the reality of the atomic bomb. It combines present-day shots, actual newsreel footage of the bombing’s aftermath, and excerpts from Children of Hiroshima, another film that fuses the genres of fiction and documentary.19 Moreover, it presents a provocative mise en abyme, in which we see other film crews restaging Hiroshima, reconstructing burn marks to make actors look like bomb victims. This has the unsettling effect of causing us to wonder whether the footage we had seen earlier was similarly fabricated for the purpose of Resnais’s film. Hiroshima mon amour triggers conscientious doubt on the part of the spectator – a degree of skepticism not necessarily present in Night and Fog, where the segments from Triumph of the Will and The Last Stage are uncritically mistaken for objective footage. While building off of Night and Fog’s hybrid structure, it achieves a more overt commentary on the potential artificiality of what appears authentic.

As Nicola Whelan writes, “Hiroshima mon amour implies the danger of reconstructions that are so realistic that they create the impression of having actually witnessed something, when all that has been seen is the representation.”20 We see how the reconstructions of Hiroshima have taken on a quality of immediacy for the French woman that is subconsciously reinforced by her past in Nevers. For her, Hiroshima has become a “prosthetic memory”: a vivid recollection that is not her own but which she appropriated through her visual encounter with Hiroshima and which she confounds with lived experience because of the intense identification it produced.21

The opening sequence, however, reminds us that this equivalence of real and mediated memory is an illusion. Through a single immutable utterance – “You saw nothing” – Lui denies Elle’s attempts, and ours, to fix Hiroshima through imagery. “The tracking camera becomes her eye, just as it had been ours in Night and Fog,” writes John Moses. “As she ‘moves’ through the hospital, the museum, and the city streets, she sees – and we along with her – a great many traces from August 6, 1945.”22

  

Resnais’s use of visual counterpoint casts disquieting doubt on the precision of historical memory.

It is precisely this disembodied tracking that evokes the unreality belying the hyper-visual landscape and leads us to doubt that she ever went to these places. Resnais repeats the tracking shot in the hospital so that we see none of the doctors or victims “witnessed” by Elle in the first frame, trapping us inside an atmosphere of extreme uncertainty. “Hiroshima mon amour,” Kent Jones incisively remarks, “is a film about the anxiety of irresolution.”23 Like Night and Fog, it radically undoes documentary closure, reconceptualizing history so that it is no longer a relic of the past but a meditation in the present. By interrupting outward vision, these films force us to train our attention inward, to interrogate our memories of these traumas, and to realize that what is most important is not necessarily what remains, but what we remember.

Bibliography

Afanasyeva, Natasha. “Ambiguous Nature of Brechtian Aesthetics in Postmodern Cinema: Distance and Evolution of the V-effect.” BA Thesis, SAE Institute Zürich, 2011.

Alea, Tomás Gutierrez and Lesage, Julia. “The Viewer’s Dialectic, Part 2,” Jump Cut (1985): 48-53. Accessed April 5, 2014. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC30folder/ViewersDialectic2.html.

Carter, David. “Night and Fog.” Review of Nuit et brouillard, by Alain Resnais. The Criterion Collection, October 27, 2013, Reviews. http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/nightandfog/.

Chaverou, Eric. “Cours de cinema: Hiroshima mon amour.” France Culture: Alain Resnais, cinéma, cinémas, March 3, 2014. Accessed March 7, 2014. http://www.franceculture.fr/2014-03-03-alain-resnais-cinema-cinemas.

Death Mills. Directed by Billy Wilder. 1945. U.S Sector of West Germany: U.S Department of War. DVD.

Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon amour. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1960.

Frodon, Jean-Michel, ed. Cinema & the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010.

Hillier, Jim, ed. Cahiers du cinéma, the 1950’s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave. London: British Film Institute, 1985.

Jones, Kent. “Hiroshima mon amour: Time Indefinite.” Review of Hiroshima mon amour, by Alain Resnais. The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2003, Film Essays. http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/291-hiroshima-mon-amour-time-indefinite.

Lacey, Liam. “Alain Resnais, Cinema’s Definitive Artist of Postwar Trauma, Dies at 91.” The Globe and Mail, March 2, 2014. Accessed March 5, 2014. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/alain-resnais-cinemas-definitive-artist-of-post-war-trauma-passes-away/article17186250/.

Landsperg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Lopate, Philip. “Night and Fog.” Review of Hiroshima mon amour, by Alain Resnais. The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2003, Film Essays. http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/288-night-and-fog.

Mancini, Dan. “DVD Verdict: Hiroshima mon amour.” Review of Hiroshima mon amour, by Alain Resnais. The Criterion Collection, July 15, 2003, Reviews. http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/hiroshimamonamour.php.

Moses, John W. “Vision Denied in Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour.” Film Quarterly (1987): 159-163.

Nuit et brouillard (English subtitles.) Directed by Alain Resnais. 1955. Paris: Argo Films. DVD.

Stam, Robert. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Stubblefield, Thomas. “Love and the Burden of Memory.” In In the Dark Room: Marguerite Duras and Cinema, edited by Julie Beaulieu and Rosanna Maule, 285-316. Bern: International Academic Publishers, 2009.

Whelan, Nicola. “Place, Memory, History- Construction of Subjectivity in Alain Resnais’ and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour.” BA Thesis, National College of Art and Design, 2012.

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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from YouTube trailers and/or the DVD(s).