12 Nuit et Brouillard: a turning point in the history

and memory of the Holocaust

Christian Delage

Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) was the first major French film to deal with the Nazi
concentration camps.1 Since its release in December 1955, the career of the film has
been as much commercial as artistic, its relatively brief running time of 32 minutes al-
lowing it to be shown just as easily in commercial cinemas as on art-house screens. A
few rigorous teachers, such as Henri Agel, brought the film to the attention of genera-
tions of students before the public authorities imposed regular screenings in schools
in order to combat the resurgence of antisemitisin in French society.2 Following the
desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras in 1990, the film was programmed
on all French television channels. Such official recognition might lead one to believe
that the film, made by Alain Resnais and Jean Cayrol and produced by Anatole Dau-
man, had been received favourably from the outset or, at least, that its reputation had
since become a matter of consensus due to the gravity of its subject and the ethical and
aesthetic approach of the filmmakers. In fact, this was not the case on its release and its
reputation remains complicated half a century later.
Despite having been well received by the critics owing to its award of the Prix Jean
Vigo,3 no sooner was Night and Fog completed than it had to come to terms with sev-
eral types of censorship. The first of these originated in the French Commission for
the Classification of Films which insisted that Resnais remove shots of corpses which
were judged to be too shocking and, above all, that he excise a photograph showing a
French gendarme guarding the camp at Pithiviers.'1 Then, just as it was announced that
Night and Fog had joined the shortlist of French films to be screened at the Cannes Film
Festival, it was implicated in a political and diplomatic imbroglio: the German Embassy
in France attempted to have the film withdrawn, provoking a polemic whose scope
rapidly became international. 5 Following its initially turbulent reception, the career of
Night and Fog was characterised by a form of institutionalisation that brought with it a
second wave of criticism questioning how apposite its status was as a key work about
the history of the genocide of the Jews. Serge Klarsfeld reports that while, at the time
of its release, the film had

... greatly moved me, it can be seen differently today since it is a filnrwhose major flaw is
not to convey the singularity of the fate of the Jews. What has emerged since 1975 is the
difference between those who were deported because they were political opponents of
Nazism and those who were deported because they were born Jews.6

THE HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARY 127

In the 1990s, Georges Bensoussan emphasised that 'the genocide of the Jews is almost
absent from the film', 7 while Annette Wieviorka went further, saying that 'this film has
nothing to say regarding the genocide of the Jews'.8
By reconstructing the genesis of the film, I will endeavour to show how the film-
makers tried constantly to convey and interweave heterogeneous elements of the Nazi
concentration camp system. However, my working hypothesis is that, far from having
only been subject to the context in which it was deployed, the collective experience of
Night and Fog can be seen today as an essential stage in the work of remembering les
années noires (the years of Occupation) and the Final Solution.

When and why was Night and Fog made?

During 1954 a certain number of initiatives were taken that marked an inflection in
French policy regarding the memory of the camps. On 14 April a law was passed inaugu-
rating a National Day of Remembrance for the Victims and Heroes of the Deportation.
On 10 November, an exhibition opened at the Pedagogical Museum at 29 rue d'Ulm en-
titled Résistance-Libération-Déportation. Inaugurated by the Minister of Education, the
exhibition received almost 60,000 visitors including 30,000 students from educational
establishments in Paris. Conceived by the Committee for the History of the Second
World War (Comité d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, CHGM), the exhibi-
tion played no small part in transmitting the memory of the war and deportations.
One of the outcomes of the exhibition was the concern expressed by the Municipal
Council of Paris about the fate of the documents assembled for the occasion and this
launched the idea of'the creation in Paris of a Municipal Museum of the Resistance,
Liberation and Deportation in which the first elements will be made up of the docu-
ments above'.9 This proposal would also be taken up in the Assemblée Nationale by
Madame de Lipovsky who would present a 'proposal' with a similar outcome in mind.
If 1954 marked the tenth anniversary of the Liberation of France, the following year
would commemorate the opening of the camps. To allow for the two events to overlap,
the exhibition, scheduled to close on 9 January, was extended until 23 January 1955 at
the request of Pierre Mendès-France, the Président du Conseil.
The exhibition was acclaimed by the press both nationally and internationally for
the importance of its subject. If the New York Times straightforwardly stated that 'the
visitor learns how the occupier behaved and rediscovers the spirit behind the strug-
gle for the Liberation', 10 the Times lauded the 'objectivity' of the perspective adopted:"
'beyond the homage to the Resistance, this exhibition offers an objective commentary
on Nazi methods in occupied France and in the concentration camps'.12 In this regard,
Déportation et Liberté emphasised that 'it was a good thing that such an exhibition at-
tempted to show a large audience what the concentration camps were, using images to
explain how what happened in them was a deliberate execution of a plan that, fortu-
nately, had been stopped'.13
As well as photographic images, there were daily projections of films about the war,
the resistance and the deportations. The deportations were recalled thanks to a mon-
tage of French newsreels screened in 1945, Les Camps de la mort, '14 and a Polish fiction
film, Ostatni etap (The Last Stage),15' directed by Wanda Jakubowska in 1948. These
would be among the first documents watched by the producers of Night and Fog while

128 HOLOCAUST AND T H E MOVING IMAGE

preparing the film and would bring together the principal partners who would get the
project underway: on the French side, CHGM (the French Ministry of War Veterans)
and ZBoWid (the Union of War Veterans for Liberty and Democracy) on the Polish
side. In fact, at the beginning of January, Henri Michel, the organiser of the exhibition,
had announced that the project of'a film about the concentration camp system' was be-
ing considered. He had been in agreement about the project with the producer Anatole
Dauman and his colleagues Philippe Lifchitz and Sylvain Halfon when he welcomed
them to the exhibition.
During their visit they would have noticed that admission to the room dedicated
to the Deportation - in which 'the fate of those who, imprisoned for political or racial
reasons or for acts of resistance, suffered torture or death or were sent from French
prisons to camps in the Greater Reich was recounted - was prohibited to those under
17 years of age 'because of the tragic aspect of many of the documents exhibited'.16 The
problem of such images of atrocity was immediately uppermost in the minds of the
film's producers. In one of the first descriptions of the project, written on 3 March 1955,
Michel noted:

The subject matter and the nature of the material collected guarantees this film great
dramatic intensity but the filmmakers are aware that the pitfall that needs to be avoided
is that of subjecting the spectator to excessive horror. It is therefore important not to em-
phasis the 'sadistic', 'war crime' 'inhuman atrocity' aspect of the concentration camps but
to relate, via image and commentary, a sociological explanation. In watching this film,
former inmates must be able to recognise their ordeals but ordinary spectators must also
understand how systematic, in its combination of cruel barbarity and scientific experi-
ment, the phenomenon of the concentration camps was.1'

Two requirements had to be satisfied: firstly, the quasi-pedagogic requirement to dis-

seminate knowledge of how the concentration camps worked and secondly, relating to
the issue of memory, the requirement that the experiences of surviving deportees be
faithfully recounted." In so doing, it was equally crucial to take account of the genera-
tion gap within the audience as it was a public of young spectators that was conceived
as the film's principal target.19
To realise their plans, the producers invited Alain Resnais to direct the film. Resnais
had already made several short films, mainly about painters (VAN Gogh (1948), Gau-
guin (1950), Guernica (1950)), but he had no personal experience of the camps nor had
he been deported. He was therefore initially unwilling to take on the project, accepting
only when the producers agreed to also employ the poet Jean Cayrol, who had been
interned at Gusen camp (a satellite of Mauthausen). Although Cayrol was eventually
to write the commentary, during most of the production the team consisted of Resnais,
Dauman and the two historical advisers, Michel and Wormser.
Returning to the issue of how to utilise the atrocity images, in an interview recorded
in 1986, Resnais explained that, at the time,

People saw the film in private screenings and many said to me 'You're frightened ot the
violence, you've suppressed the terrible images we saw during the Liberation, etc' Which
is utterly wrong. I had at my disposal all the French films which had been screened at the

THE HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARY 129

 time of the Liberation and I didn't suppress any violence. They simply imagined that they
20
saw things in 1944 and 1945 that made an impression on them.

The fear of complacently recapitulating the violence of the images of the camps would
thus have led Resnais to tone them down, at least to those who remembered seeing
them. It is clear that, ten years after the screenings of the newsreel images of the camps,
shot at the precise moment they were liberated by the Allies, the memory of the event
has become denser still, nourished as it was by the thousands of written testimonies
21
published since as well as by exhibitions and reconsructions. The reconstruction of
the fate of the deportees, rather than creating a sort of critical distance, would have
reinforced the initial shock experienced in 1945, in delivering, after the event, a consist­
ency, continuity and identity to images some of whose visual elements - barbed wire,
corpses, the skeletal bodies of the survivors - had acquired a dimension that was as
much factual as symbolic."

The archival research

Which images had Resnais actually found during the preparation of the film in 1955?
There were those from the Auschwitz museum, seen on a visit with Henri Michel and
Olga Wormser in September; those found by Michel in Holland at the Rijksinstituut
voor Oorlogsdokumentatie (RIOD); those available in Paris from French television,
Gaumont or the associations of former deportees. But according to Resnais, quite a
number of archives had not been visited: the Imperial War Museum in London ('we
were told that they would not make any documents available'); 23 the National Archives
in Washington D.C. (Ί think they would have been too costly'. André Heinrich: 'Was it
a question of the price or did they not wish to make anything available to you?' Resnais:
Ί don't recall any such refusal');24 the Film Service of the French Army (Service Ciné-
matographique des Armées, SCA) which 'didn't hold anything of note. All the same,
I'd requested a shot of an inauguration of a monument to the dead, something of that
nature which I thought might be useful but I never received it. I got a letter instead,
stating that given the character of the film they were not able to make any documents
available to us.' Besides Resnais' choice of image, a choice that seems largely to have
been one made out of lack of choice, it is worth drawing attention to the censorship
imposed by the SCA ('given the character of the film'). This attitude might appear sur-
prising, since the film \vas still only at the writing stage and had already received the
moral and financial support of, among others, the Minister of Former Servicemen. In
reality, Resnais, who had only recently denounced French colonialism in Les Statues
meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1953), undertook the film with the same political in-
tention as his producers: the film was conceived as 'a warning' in contemporary France
which was engaged in a colonial war in Algeria. When the film was first screened, Jean
Cayrol would write:

In the indifferent sky of these dry images are menacing, ever-moving clouds of racism.
They roll and break over certain places, cutting down those underneath. Memory en-
dures only as long as it is illuminated by the present. Though the crematoria are now
nothing more than sorry skeletons, and silence falls like a shroud over the sites of former

130 H O L O C A U S T A N D T H E MOVING IMAGE

 camps now eaten by weeds, let us not forget that our own country is not exempt from the
scandal of racism.26

Despite the relative paucity of material held by the SCA, Argos Productions tried in
vain to get the organisation to go back on its decision." Finally, Resnais, who had
discovered images of Buchenwald at the SCA, obtained them from Gaumont where
he would even have access to 'Unused' material ("sujets "Non Utilisés'") while editing
newsreel footage.28

The historiographie situation

What role did historical advisors play in the making of the film and what was the state
of historiographical study of the Nazi genocide in 1955?
In October 1944, and on the model established after the First World War, the pro-
visional government of the French Republic set up the Commission of the History of
the Occupation and Liberation of France (Commission d'histoire de l'Occupation et
de la libération de la France) which was attached to the Ministry of Education and was
directed to study the Resistance, while the Committee of the History of the War, created
in 1945, under the auspices of the Presidency of the Conseil was specifically charged
with gathering the stocks of documents mostly from ministries and administrations. 29
The amalgamation of the two bodies in 1951 saw the foundation of the CHGM within
which a Committee for the History of the Deportation (Comité d'histoire de la Dépor-
tation) was created. In 1950, Henri Michel, director of CHGM, produced the first vol-
ume of the publication Que sais-je? devoted to the history of the French Resistance.
This was followed, in 1954, by a collection of 190 texts, edited in collaboration with
Olga Wormser, entitled Tragedy of the Deportation 1940-1945: Testimonies of Survivors
of the German Concentration Camps {Tragédie de la déportation 1940-1945. Témoigna-
ges de survivants des camps de concentration allemands). In their introduction, Michel
and Wormser appear to approach the history of the deportations in keeping with a
context where, as Henry Rousso recalls it, 'historical research didn't much concern it-
self with the Vichy regime and barely at all with its anti-Jewish policies, concentrating
greatly on the history of the Resistance, on deportation (but not in its racial sense) and
on German repression.'3" In fact, the editors explain that they wished to preserve 'the
memory of those millions of martyrs belonging to every social class and every denomi-
nation and among whose number were citizens of 22 nations'." Yet, in a circumlocutory
introduction to one of the texts in the anthology, Michel and Wormser write:

Individual executions would only deliver 'derisory' numerical results, owing to the size
of the camps and the goal set by the SS, the extermination of inferior races (Jews and
Gyspies) and the enemies of the Reich. The disguising of murder is one of the most strik-
ing aspects of the organisation of the camps. In no other historical circumstance and in
no other country has there ever existed a means of dispensing death as 'perfected' and as
prolific as in the crematoria of Auschwitz. No need, there, for the pretext of deficiency,
age or disobedience. The deportees in Auschwitz (with the exception of several hundred
'Ayran politicals' who would, nevertheless, die there in great number) had to die because
they were Jews.32

THE HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARY 131

 One could hardly be any clearer in presenting the specificity of the genocide of
the Jews and the dedicated role that Auschwitz played in it. For that matter, it was not
Resnais who decided to film footage of Majdanek and Auschwitz - even though he
proposed to differentiate them from the archive images by filming them in colour - but
Henri Michel. One of the film's producers sent a note to Resnais dated 3 May 1955, al-
beit three weeks before the director signed his contract: "We have been visited by Mon-
sieur Henri Michel who has shared with us his positive outlook for our film following
his recent trip to Poland', wrote Philippe Lifchitz. 'He is deeply affected by the emotion
of this visit to the camps which he made in the company of former deportees. He thinks
that the sight of the empty camps and the museums where the personal effects and rel-
ics of the former prisoners are preserved could only impress you and may even had
an influence on your conception of the film...'. One notices, however, that this thinking
about the camps oscillated between emphasising the specificity of the Jewish genocide
and presenting all deportees as a single community united by a tragic fate. One comes
across a similar oscillation in the two special issues of the CHGM publication published
before and after the making of the film.
The first, published in 1954, is devoted to the study of the German camp system33
and focuses mainly on the concentration camps: 'Nearly ten years have passed since the
deportations ended and the survivors returned. Memories are being steadily erased;
documents that weren't recovered immediately are at risk of disappearing. Every effort
must be made in order to gather them together.' One of the contributors to the issue is
introduced as describing life in the Mauthausen camp with 'objectivity and precision', no
doubt because of his own experiences as a 'NN' prisoner (Nacht und Nebel Schutzhäf-
tling 63.584 K.L.M). Among the texts in Michel and Wormser's anthology is an extract
by Jean Cayrol, in which the writer also emphasises the particularity of this identity:34 Ί
speak here only about a category of prisoner which I know well, those who were "Nacht
und Nebel", that's to say, who received no parcels, no news and who were completely
cut oft" from the outside world.' 15 These two publications informed the choices made in
writing the synopsis of the film, even in the evolving titles given to the film: 'Film about
Deportation' (1 March 1955); 'Film on the Concentration Camps' (3 March); 'Resist­
ance and Deportation' (20 May); 'Night and Fog' (24 May). Elsewhere, in their first
description of the project, Michel and Wormser take up the idea already developed in
their anthology, to follow 'in its stations and its trials, the Way of the Cross engraved
by the deportees: internment, transportation, arrival, absorption into the world of the
camp, daily life, work, illness and death'. However, even with the Christian overtones
of the deportees' Calvary, mention of the particular fate of the Jews is not omitted. In
the preamble to the synopsis, it is, at first, associated explicitly with the presence of the
Germans in France: 'the fate of the Jews (census, yellow star, despoilment, internment
camps, the round-up)', then, implicitly, with Nazi ideology: 'Flashback: Nazi parade at
Nuremberg, Hitler, Himmler, Goering. Phrases from Mein Kampf about the extermina­
tion of adversaries and inferior races.' Henri Michel presents this in paying tribute to
the work undertaken by the Jewish Centre of Contemporary Documentation (le Centre
de Documentation Juive Contemporaine) and explains:

Since the Nuremberg trials, the proof has been supplied and convictions secured for the
unprecedented crime committed against the Jews by the Third Reich. However, discus-

132 HOLOCAUST A N D THE MOVING IMAGE

 sion over its exact magnitude has not ended and controversy ignites when the number
of victims is evaluated.36 To fix the figure precisely has been the work of Léon Poliakov.
In the absence of any certainty other than it being a matter of millions of human beings,
at least the converging testimonies and the statistical evaluations allow for a realistic
minimum of six million dead. It is the monstrosity of this figure that makes the crime of
the Nazis something new ... "The Final Solution' of'the Jewish Problem' put in process
by Himmler can only be understood as part of the ideology ot Nazism from which it
directly issued.

Not only is the specificity of the genocide of the Jews clearly presented, with the figures
to hand, but the responsibility of the Vichy regime is sharply emphasised:

Could one make out, in Vichy, the flames of Auschwitz? The skill of the Nazis, or their
historical stroke of luck, was to have involved in their work of annihilation the govern-
ments, free to a greater or lesser extent, of peoples momentarily subjugated. That this
collaboration did not take place without shame, remorse, conflict or opposition is clearly
shown by the way the wheels of the French state turned, as Joseph Billig has studied.
This sharing of responsibilities was not easy. But the deliberate choice of collaboration
- whether it resulted from a tragic error of judgement or from day-to-day opportunism
- constrained those who made it to take part in the crime, implying their complicity,
even when their presence meant that the severity of the crime was, for the time being,
watered down. The clinching fact: the very affirmation of their independence led the
Vichy governments to anticipate and outstrip the Occupation authorities in the measures
taken against the Jews.57

The final self-censorship of Night and Fog

One can therefore propose that, far from marking a fallow period in the conjoined evo-
lution of the history and memory of the Jewish genocide and the role of Vichy in the
Final Solution, the years 1954-56 constitute a crucial link in the chain. In this context,
Alain Resnais' film is not the simple 'representation of something which preceded it
or which overwhelmed it in terms of the event's intelligibility. Resnais accompanies the
movement I have just described, being without doubt the only one able to unite per-
sonalities with different experiences of the war around a common task. Aged only 33,
Resnais involved himself with great humility in the ethical and aesthetic adventure that
made Night and Fog an inaugural film in many respects. One of the film's major contri-
butions lies in its anguished reflection on the trap of taking the visible as evidence and, α
fortiori, on voyeurism as the common means of confronting history. This approach led,
three years later, to Resnais meeting Marguerite Duras and to the writing oí'Hiroshima
mon amour. If the filmmaker, like the historian, assumes the task of reconstructing the
past it is through explicitly accepting a relationship with the present in which the past
evolves. He can also go further and continue, whatever the subject addressed, to ask
himself general questions about the compression of time and levels of the perception of
temporality.38 One of Resnais' responses to such questions had already been tried out
in his earlier short films: the use of the travelling shot.3'' In writing the screenplay, he
therefore started by foregrounding the time-lag between the progression of historical

THE HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARY 133

knowledge or memory of the Nazi death camps and the ineluctable decay of the visible
traces of their existence:

Night and Fog. Colour. A landscape: calm, neutral, banal. The camera tracks back. We
are inside a concentration camp, closed down and deserted. The camera pans, disclosing
the entrance to the camp in the distance flanked by a watchtower. (We can perhaps even
see a group of tourists dressed in bright colours entering the camp led by a guide. The
weather can be bright but, subsequently, the sky must always remain cloudy and grey). A
series of very slow pans, each starting from an 'exterior' element and coming to rest on an
'interior' element. (Ideally, each of these pans should have been shot in a different camps:
Struthoff, Mauthausen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek.)

Here, a little further on in the synopsis, is what Resnais wrote regarding 1942:

Black-and-white. Himmlers second visit in 1942. The German war effort. The multiplica-
tion of the camps after this visit. The variety of human material transported. Twenty-two
countries. '10,000 Russian women to dig anti-tank ditches' etc. The 'definitive solution
to the Jewish problem', decided upon in 1942. 'Inferior races must work for us. The Jews,
Poles, Gypsies and Russians must be eliminated, but productively. Elimination by work
is the most productive', etc...

The historians of the CHGM, who gave their agreement to the synopsis with a highly
official stamp on the first page, imposed a few modifications to the first three lines:

Black-and-white. Himmlers second visit in 1942 ['to Auschwitz']. The German war ef-
fort. The multiplication of the camps ['the camps' removed and replaced by 'Kommandos
and crematoria'] after this visit ['The Pohl Law'].

Then, after shooting, came the moment for Jean Cayrol's commentary to be edited. On
this final phase of the production, however crucial, we are unfortunately unable to rely
on any written documentation.'' 0 This is the passage devoted to the year 1942 in its final
version:

1942. Himmler visits the sites. It is necessary to exterminate, but this must be done pro-
ductively. Leaving productivity to the technicians, Himmler turns to the problem of elim-
ination. Plans and models are studied. The deportees themselves will participate in the
work of execution. A crematoria can, at times, have a touch of the picture postcard about
it. Later on - today - tourists will photograph each other in front of it. The deportations
spread throughout Europe.

The reference which Resnais himself had put in inverted commas, as if it were a his-
torical fact external to any literary or cinematic treatment ('The "definitive solution to
the Jewish problem", decided upon in 1942') has disappeared. This last cut was made
without any modification to the images and on the sole initiative of Cayrol, who was the
final arbiter in the chain of collective decisions in the making of the film. The histori-
ans, moreover, started to express their displeasure at feeling excluded from control over

134 HOLOCAUST A N D THE MOVING IMAGE

the editing. This cut must, no doubt, be understood in relation to Cayrol's style of writ-
ing, more literary than historical. His own experience of the war should also be borne
in mind: having known deportation as a resistance fighter he was anxious principally
to evoke daily life in the camps and to situate the film in the contemporary reality of
militancy regarding the Algerian War. Furthermore, Anatole Dauman, who was born
in the Russian-Polish Jewish community of Warsaw in 1925, had also been involved
in the battles for the Liberation of France and preferred to emphasise his identity as a
resistance fighter over his Jewish identity.11 This is according to the CHGM historians
Henri Michel and Olga Wormser who, as we have already seen from their publications,
were at the forefront of historical research in the 1950s and, it should be emphasised,
confident in the power of cinema. These two were beginning to merely introduce into
the historiography of the time, dominated as it was by work on the Resistance, analysis
of the genesis of the extermination of the European Jews.
This period of the 1950s is, therefore, far more complicated than certain periodisa-
tions of the history of the Holocaust in France would lead one to believe. The multiple
experiences brought together in the birth of the film have had simultaneously dynamic
and constraining effects. Nevertheless, we are faced with a work that is utterly apart,
sufficiently achieved and personal to have withstood the ravages of time even while
having been part of this key moment in French historiography that saw the beginning
of scholarly writing on the history of the Jewish genocide. This scholarship was not yet
animating the historical community or the public memory to the extent we know today.
We should not regard Night and Fog with suspicion from an anachronistic perspective
- ignoring similar unsuccessful attempts in other post-war countries - while taking
advantage of the fact that the director never attempted to make a monument of his film
that would prove intimidating to spectators. Thanks to the desolate gentleness of his
film, Resnais will allow many generations to be able to behold the filmed images and
the material traces of the Nazi death camps.

Translated by Chris Darke.

Notes

1 This article could not have been written without the opportunity to have access to the archives of Argos
Films, of Jean Cayrol and of the Committee of the History of the Second World War (Comité de l'histoire
de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, CHGM). My particular thanks go to Florence Dauman (Argos Films),
Thierry Frémaux and Nicolas Riedel (Institut Lumière), Albert Dichy (1MEC) and Jean Astruc (IHTP-
CNRS), as well as to those institutions who allowed me to present this paper and to make corrections to
it afterwards: The Imperial War Museum (London), The University of Paris I (Seminar on the History of
the Holocaust), the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), New York University and the Holocaust
Educational Foundation (Lessons and Legacies VII, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis).
2 As Serge Daney recalls, 'Henri Agel - professeur de lettres at the lycée Voltaire - was one of the most
singular communicators ("passeurs"). In order that he, as much as we, could skip Latin classes he put
the following choice to the vote: to spend an hour studying a text by Livy or to go to the cinema. The
class, which voted for the cinema, regularly left the dilapidated old ciné-club feeling pensive. Out of
sadism, and probably because he had copies of them, Agel would show films thai were ideal lor teaching

THE HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARY 135

 adolescents a thing or two. These were Le Sang des bêtes by Franju and Nuit et Brouillard by Resnais.' S.
Daney (1992) 'Le Travelling de Kapo', Trafic, 4, 7. Henri Age! (born in 1911) has taught film history for
many years and is the author of, among other works, Le cinéma et le Sacre (Paris: Cerf, 1961), Cinéma et
nouvelle naissance (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981) and Un art de la Célébration: le cinéma de Flaherty à Rouch
(Paris: Cerf, 1987).
3 The Prix Jean Vigo was awarded on 31 January 1956. Resnais had already won the prize two years earlier
for Les Statues meurent aussi, which did not prevent the film from remaining banned from 1956.
4 Henry Rousso recalls that Resnais was 'obliged to efface the telltale kepi of a gendarme spotted during a
scene in the Pithiviers internment camp (created by the Germans but administered by the French). This
was a strange stroke of the censor's brush, for what was suppressed was not a product of the director's
imagination or his emphasis but an image from the period, hence a patent fact.' H. Rousso (1987) Le
Syndrome de Vichy, 1944-198.... Paris: Editions du Seuil, 144-5.
5 The French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Christian Pineau, had in fact received a letter from the German
Federal Republic demanding that Night and Fog be withdrawn from the official selection, invoking arti-
cle 5 of the Festival rules which stipulated that a film could be excluded from competition if it attacked
the reputation of a participating country. For the Berliner Zeitung, 'the scandal of Cannes is of German
making, not French. Our representatives have neither the breadth of intellect nor the maturity necessary
to accept a film showing German faults.' The Swiss refused to show the film, citing their neutrality as
the reason. The French did not have much to be proud of, however: beside the censoring of the shot of
the gendarme at Pithiviers, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Christian Pineau, broke ranks with
the Secretary of State of Industry and Commerce, Maurice Lemaire, who decided the list of films to be
retained in the official selection at Cannes. Lemaire considered that 'the very special character of the
film is such that it could not compete with fiction films or even films of historical reconstruction...'. See
R. Raskin (ed.) (1987) Nuil et Brouillard by Alain Resnais: On the Making, Reception and Functions of a
Major Documentary Film: including a New Interview with Alain Resnais and the Original Shooting Script.
Âarhus: Àarhus University Press, 33-45.
6 Interview given to André Heinrich for the radio programme 'Nuit et Brouillard au-delà de la censure',
broadcast 6 August 1994 on France Culture.
7 G. Bensoussan (1998) Auschwitz en heritage? D'un bon usage de la mémoire. Paris: Éditions des Mille et
une Nuits, 44.
8 A. Wieviorka ( 1992) Déportation et genocide. Entre la mémoire et l'oubli. Paris: Pion, 223.
9 In 1952, the City of Paris had already allotted a site at the corner of rue Geoffroy LAsnier and the rue
du Grenier-sur-l'Eau and contributed one million francs to erecting a 'Tomb for the Unknown Jewish
Martyr' the first stone of which was laid on 17 May 1953. See A. Wieviorka (1987) 'Un lieu de mémoire
et d'histoire: le Mémorial du martyr juif inconnu', Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1-2, 107-32.
10 Edition of 24 November 1954, cited in the Committee for the Two Anniversaries (Comité national des
deux anniversaries); Committee for the History of the Second World War (1955) Résistance-Libération-
Déportation Exhibition, 10 November 1954-23 January 1955. Paris: Musée pédagogique, 7 (IHTP-CNRS
archives, RF. 527, 1).
11 The organisers were very concerned with their scientific legitimacy. They were keen to emphasise that the
exhibition was 'strictly historical, without any aspect of polemic or propaganda' (Ibid., 3) (IHTP-CNRS
archives, RF. 527, 3).
12 Edition of 11 November 1954 (Ibid., 7).
13 Edition of October-December 1954 (Ibid., 8).
14 On Ihis document, seeC. Drame (1996) 'Représenter l'irreprésentable: les camps nazis dans les actualités
françaises de 1945', Cinémathèque, 10, Autumn, I2-27.

136 H O L O C A U S T AND THE MOVING IMAGE

15 On this film, see Wieviorka 1987: 293-312 and S. Liebman (1988) 'Les Premières constellations du dis-
cours sur l'Holocauste dans le cinéma polonais', in A. de Baecque and C. Delage (eds) De l'Histoire au
cinéma. Paris and Brussels: Éditions Complexe, collection: 'Histoires du temps présent', 193-216.
16 Exhibition catalogue p. 3. In Le Monde a capsule review of the exhibition explained: 'Visitors under 17 years
of age are not allowed access to the room devoted to the deportation, which is as it should be. Far from
drawing from the material the lessons available to adults, they would only encounter visions of an incon-
ceivable nightmare. Nothing of the tragedy of the concentration camps has been left in the dark: a bathtub
used by the Gestapo in Avenue Foch, deportees' personal effects, a desk blotter made of human skin, the
apparatus of a gas chamber, photographs of living dead and mass graves...' cited in Raskin 1987: 27.
17 'Documentary film on the "German concentration camp system'" 2ps. Argos Films Archives, Institut
Lumière, Lyons (Argos Archives hereafter).
18 On which subject, the principal criticism of the film made (after the fact) by Claude Lanzmann: "The
subject of Resnais' film is what happened to those who weren't killed immediately which is to say that it
is, in a way, a film if not about the survivors, then about those who had the chance of survival and not
at all about those who were killed straight away because, in their case, there was nothing to film as there
was no trace left ... It's a film that produces catharsis. In a way, people leave it feeling relieved.' Interview
with André Heinrich, broadcast cited.
19 An agreement was made with the Minister of National Education granting him non-commercial and
non-exclusive rights to screen the film in an educational context.
20 Interview with Raskin 1987: 57-8.
21 On this subject, see P. Lagrou (2000) The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Re-
covery in Western Europe, 1945-1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in particular the chapter
'National Martyrdom', pp. 210-50.
22 On the problem of the attestation and perception of violence in the camps in 1945, see C. Delage (2001)
'L'image comme preuve. Lexpérience du procès de Nuremberg', Vingtième siècle. Revue d'histoire, 72,
October-December, 63-78.
23 Interview with Raskin 1987: 53. It should be noted that there was nothing sinister about the fact that
Resnais was denied access to the Imperial War Museum's collection: this was probably for reasons of
logistics rather than censorship. At this stage in the archive's history, (here were no viewing facilities at
the Museum for the public (the cinema was not built until the 1960s) and in fact the film storage and
preservation facilities at Hayes had not yet been constructed.
24 Interview with André Heinrich, programme cited.
25 Ibid.
26 J. Cayrol (1956) 'We conceived Night and Fog as a warning', Les Lettres Françaises, 606, 9 February 1956.
For the producer Anatole Dauman, the film had a precise political objective, which cannot have been
displeasing to the Polish communist organisations who were partners in the project: 'to explain clearly
how the system of the concentration camps (and its economic aspect) flowed automatically from Fascism
and to recall the birth of the camps at the same time as the victory of the Nazis in 1933 ... Be Alert: "fas-
cism is always possible".' ('Note on the Saturday 28 May, 1955 meeting', Argos Films Archives).
27 A hastily written note, of October 1955, indicates 'SCA: approaches ongoing' (Argos Films).
28 The two subjects to which Resnais had access were: 'Buchenwald and Dachau Trials' ( 1947-NU-301) and
'Buchenwald Tribunal' (1947-NU-578).
29 In an interview, Henri Michel was keen to clarify that 'the time is past when private companies under-
took large contemporary historical studies, as was the case for the First World War. Today, historical
research, as with the scientific research of which it is only a part, cannot be done without public institu-
tions. But this support, or higher patronage, does not come accompanied by directives or prohibitions.

THE H O L O C A U S T D O C U M E N T A R Y 137
 The facilities put at the disposal of historians carry no restrictions as regards the mastery of their work.'
Tendances, 56. December 1968, 645.
30 H. Rousso (1998) La hantisse du passé. Paris: Textuel, 72-3.
31 H. Michel and O. Wormser (1954) Tragédie de la déportation 1940-1945. Témoignages de survivants des
camps de concentration allemands. Paris: Hachette, 10.
32 Ibid., 401-2.
33 'The German Concentration Camp System (1940-1944)', Revue d'histoire de la deuxième guerre mondi-
ale, 15-16, July-September 1954, with contributions by J. Cain, 'Foreword'; G. Tillion, 'Reflections on
Studying the Deportation"; M. de Bouard, 'Mauthausen'; 0. Wormser, 'Concentration camp labour in the
German War Economy'; M. Granet, 'The Deportation at the Nuremberg International Trial'; H. Michel,
"file Work of the Commission for the History of the Deportation'; R. Vivier, 'The Deportation in Indre-
et-Loire (Statistical Study)'.
34 Born in 1911, Cayrol was deported to Mauthausen for his role in the Resistance. He is the author of
Poems of Night and Fog (Poèmes de la nuit et brouillard) Paris: Éditions Pierre Seghers, 1946. This was
re-published in 1995 as Poèmes de ¡a Nuit et du Brouillard; Suivis de Larmes Publiques (Paris: Éditions du
Seuil) for which he received the Renaudot Prize. After Night and Fog Cayrol wrote with Resnais the script
for Muriel ou le Temp d'un Retour (1963). Jean Cayrol died on 10 February 2005.
35 J. Cayrol ( 1950) Lazare parmi nous. Neuchatel: Éditions de la Baconnière, cited by Michel & Wormser
1954: 136-7. As Annette Wieviorka ( 1987: 229) recalls, 'neither a badge of resistance, nor a designation
for extermination as is commonly believed, the expression "Nacht und Nebel" has, however, become a
symbol with a double meaning. If we have insisted on this decree it is in as much that it has seemed to
illustrate the extreme complexity of the deportation in France ... In order to symbolise the system of
the concentration camps and, increasingly, the extermination of the Jews, we use the name of a decree
concocted by the Wehrmacht at Hitler's initiative attempting to preserve judicial measures leading first
to deportation, certainly in Germany, in prisons outside the camp system, before it later replaced the
RSHA:
36 In a note at the foot of the page, Henri Michel adds: 'As we have seen recently, with the screening in
Germany of a work by the Committee of the History of the Second World War, the film Night and Fog'
H. Michel (1956), preface to the special issue on "The Condition of the Jews', Revue of the History of the
Second World War, 24 October, 2 - 3 .
37 H. Michel (1956) preface to the special issue on 'The Condition of the Jews', Revue of the History of the
Second World War, 24, October, 2 - 3 . With contributions by E. Vermeil, 'Antisemitism in Nazi Ideology';
J. Billig, 'The Condition of Jews in France'; M. Borwicz, '"Final Solutions" in the light of Auschwitz-Birk-
enau"; L. Poltakov, 'How many victims?'; M. Mazor, 'Documents'.
3S 'History is time', Alain Resnais explained recently. 'Cinema too. But time constructs memories and it's
not always easy to be confronted by them ... We all have need of imagination. But this is not incompat-
ible with history, nor with dealing rigorously with archival documents. 1 try to show this in my films.
Imagination is not the reconstruction of the camps "for real" but rather an ability to step back from
archival imagery.' Interview with A. de Baecque and C. Vassé (2000) 'The Century of Cinema' hors série,
Cahiers du cinéma, November, 73-4.
39 In 1955 Resnais continued to experiment with this technique not only in Night and Fog but also in the
film about the Bibliothèque nationale Toute la mémoire du monde. On this subject, see L. Liotard (2001)
'Le Travelling est-il une affaire de morale? Le cinéma d'Alain Resnais de Van Gogh à Hiroshima mon
amour (1948-1959)', Masters thesis. University of Paris 8.
40 What we know is that lean Cayrol, who had already discussed the writing of the synopsis with Resnais
at length, had been overwhelmed by the film's first edited version and had preferred to re-work his text

138 HOLOCAUST AND THE MOVING tMAGE

 without attaching' it to the images. It was Chris Marker, the person who had first introduced Resnais and
Cayrol, who took charge of adapting text to image, before finally submitting this version to Cayrol.
41 Agent P2 in the French Combat Forces, no. 43.884, Anatole Dauman was a member of the National Un-
ion of Escaped Prisoners of War, no. 4,048, Honorary Candidate of the Croix de guerre medal 1939-45.

THE HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARY 139