| The laws of physics may suggest that time is not relative, but one of the more useful qualities of art is that it is not necessarily bound to reflect these laws. Instead, art can allow us to conceptualize the universe in wholly original ways, and there’s no reason that cinema shouldn’t do the same.
The collapse of time is particularly noticeable in the early films by French director Alain Resnais – Night and Fog (1956), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961) – all of which have recently been released on DVD. In each of these films, the past co-exists with and shapes the present as the present co-exists with and shapes the future. This confronts us with a kind of atemporal tyranny, through which we are forced always to remember the past – particularly the painful elements we’d most like to forget.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Night and Fog, the 30-minute documentary about Nazi concentration camps that announced Resnais to the world in 1956, just 11 years after their liberation. One of the earliest and most powerful cinematic reflections on the Holocaust, the film brings the horror of the past crashing into the pastoral present by juxtaposing black-and-white archival footage of the camps from the Second World War with colour sequences shot by Resnais and his crew at Auschwitz and Majdanek in the 1950s.
Although the black-and-white footage is extremely horrific abutted against the serene colour footage, it serves as a reminder that the world in which the atrocities of the Holocaust took place is also the world in which we live. The film clearly shows what is so difficult to describe about the camps as they existed in 1956 and as they still exist today –that genocide was carried out in such an unexceptional landscape. When I visited Dachau five years ago and stood on the grounds among the long grey buildings that lay squat beneath an even greyer and squatter Bavarian sky, it was the ordinariness of the place that was indeed most troubling.
Resnais conveys this awareness with unrelenting precision, and the film’s impact derives not from what he attempts to show us, but rather what he insists that we imagine for ourselves. This is accomplished in part through voice-over narration, written by concentration camp survivor Jean Cayrol and dispassionately delivered by actor Michel Bouquet.
"Of this brick dormitory and these tormented dreams, we can but show you the outer shell, the surface," says Bouquet over images of deserted and demolished buildings. "With our sincere gaze we survey these ruins, as if the old monster lay crushed forever beneath the rubble…. We pretend it all only happened 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."
Night and Fog contends that all of us are complicit in human suffering to one degree or another. By eliminating the barriers between past and present, Resnais and his colleagues were attempting to show audiences the way to a future in which they would put an end to that suffering. Unfortunately, the film remains relevant today because we have yet to achieve that goal.
Clearly, any concept of memory or history depends equally upon a concept of time passing, but in Resnais’s film, history is only part of the present. This compression of time makes Night and Fog, as well as the two fiction films that he directed afterward, both confounding and mesmeric. Like all films, they unfold in time, but because they lack an ascertainable chronology –insofar as one scene or sequence relates to another – they are difficult to recall and even more difficult to write about. Consider two viewings as the minimum necessary to even begin understanding any of them – like fever dreams, they follow no ordinary logic, but like all great art, they can show us the world in new, exciting and perhaps even liberating ways. |
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