Material Remains: Night and Fog

EMMA WILSON

In his “Seminar on Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann comments:

I used to say that if there had been—by sheer obscenity or miracle—a
film actually shot in the past of three thousand people dying together
in a gas chamber, first of all, I think that no one human being would
have been able to look at this. Anyhow, I would have never included
this in the film. I would have preferred to destroy it. It is not visible.
You cannot look at this.1

Lanzmann has variously criticized Alain Resnais’s 1955 documentary Night and Fog
for its use of images. Following Lanzmann, there has been a tendency to typify the
two films, Shoah (1985) and Night and Fog, as differing, even opposing, responses
to the call to bear witness to the horror of the Holocaust. Following Giorgio
Agamben’s discussion of the English film shot in Bergen-Belsen immediately after
the camp’s liberation in Remnants of Auschwitz and Georges Didi-Huberman’s
moves in Images malgré tout to resurrect the notion of image as trace and as truth,
the critical importance of Night and Fog (with and against Shoah) seems open again
for debate.2 The opposition of Night and Fog and Shoah, and in particular the use
of images in the former, deserves closer scrutiny. Night and Fog is too frequently
divided from the body of Resnais’s filmmaking, which more consistently casts
doubt on the image and its referentiality. Aligning this film with Resnais’s other
early films and documentaries about art, such as Guernica (1950), Les Statues
meurent aussi (1953), and Le Chant du styrène (1958), offers a differing perspective
on the film.3 This is the context in which Night and Fog will be discussed here.

1. Claude Lanzmann, “Seminar on Shoah,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991), pp. 82–99.
2. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(New York: Zone Books, 1999); Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Minuit, 2003).
3. The juxtaposition of this article with Edward Dimendberg’s “‘There are not Exercises in Style”: Le
Chant du Styrène” (this volume, pp. 63–88) enables contextualization of Night and Fog within Resnais’s early
filmmaking.

OCTOBER 112, Spring 2005, pp. 89–110. © 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
90 OCTOBER

Previous discussions of the film, urgent in their ethical questioning, have often
chosen not to dwell closely on the material details of Resnais’s filmmaking. In
Night and Fog, as elsewhere, Resnais grapples with remnants, with material
remains, with human remains, and with the affective horror and intractability of
their presence. Yet in showing material objects and bodily evidence, he asks view-
ers to think contrarily about the malleability of proof and the impossibility of
grasping the past, and in particular about the incomprehensibility of mass
trauma.

II

The recent Arte/vidéo DVD of Night and Fog (a thirty-two-minute film) is

accompanied by a recording of a 272-minute radio program, “Nuit et Brouillard,
1954–1994,” produced for France Culture by André Heinrich and Nicole Vuillaume.
This radio program draws together interviews with Resnais, Anatole Dauman (the
producer of the film), Michel Bouquet (the actor who reads Jean Cayrol’s commen-
tary), the historian Olga Wormser, and the survivor Serge Klarsfeld.4 In addition,
there are detailed interviews with Lanzmann.5 Lanzmann addresses the difficulty he
has in speaking about Night and Fog. He makes the crucial point that, as opposed to
Night and Fog, Shoah is specifically a film about the destruction of the Jews.6 For
Lanzmann, Night and Fog is a film about survivors; Resnais does not treat Treblinka or

4. Historians Olga Wormser and Henri Michel were directors of the “Comité d’histoire de la
Deuxième Guerre mondiale” that commissioned the documentary from Resnais. Wormser and Michel
published a volume, La Tragédie de la déportation, in June 1954 and in November of the same year orga-
nized the exhibition Résistance—Libération—Déportation.
5. Didi-Huberman draws on interviews with Lanzmann cited in Vincent Lowy, L’Histoire Infilmable
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), pp. 85–86. See Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 166. Lanzmann
recounts passing by a cinema where Shoah was due to screen at 2 o’clock. Night and Fog had been sched-
uled for a noon screening. Lanzmann objected that he would withdraw Shoah if Night and Fog were
shown. He comments: “I think that the confrontation or juxtaposition of these two films makes no
sense. Even if the subject is identical, Shoah has nothing to do with Night and Fog.”
6. This is an important and troubled issue with respect to the reception of Night and Fog. Jean
Cayrol, who wrote the commentary of the film, was a political prisoner in Mauthausen. For Lanzmann,
Cayrol and Resnais between them have made a film about the deportation. Lanzmann claims that the
word Jew or Jewish is not spoken in the film. In fact it is spoken, but only once (in the evocation of a
Jewish student from Amsterdam); scant images are seen of deportees bearing the yellow star on their
clothes. However, Charles Krantz notes rightly, “a close analysis of the film reveals not a single state-
ment of the fact that the Holocaust was a particularly Jewish experience” (Krantz, “Teaching Night and
Fog: History and Historiography,” Film and History 15, no. 1 [1985], pp. 2–15). He continues: “Alain
Resnais recently suggested to this author that to have dealt with the fate of the Jews would have been
inappropriate in that it might have diverted attention away from the universal message of vigilance
that he wanted to convey, though he conceded the possibility of an error of judgment” (p. 6). Robert
Michael goes further: “No one can doubt the humanistic intent of Resnais and Cayrol. But their silence
unintentionally mirrors Himmler’s imperative that ‘in public we will never speak . . . of the evacuation
of the Jews, the annihilation of the Jewish people’” (in Robert Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain
Resnais [Aarhus, Germany: Aarhus University Press, 1987], p. 159). Raskin’s valuable volume contains a
fully reconstructed shooting script of Night and Fog, an interview with Resnais, and numerous extracts
from criticism on the film.
Material Remains: Night and Fog 91

Sobibor, the extermination camps in which no traces are left. Lanzmann suggests
that viewers will find catharsis in Night and Fog, where Shoah, by contrast, offers no
commentary, no images from the camps, working instead to open space for the
work of interior reflection. Lanzmann addresses in particular Resnais’s choice to
use images of corpses moved by bulldozers.7 He states categorically that he would
have never used these images.
In an important recent article, “Nuit et Brouillard: Défence et illustration,”
Adolphe Nysenholc cites Lanzmann’s criticisms of Night and Fog and argues that
Shoah was constructed in opposition to Night and Fog, and to its use of archival
images.8 He then mounts his defense of Night and Fog in two ways. First, he points
to the possible aestheticism of Shoah and to certain (inevitable) similarities
between the films of Resnais and Lanzmann: in their filming of the Polish land-
scape, of the railway tracks and trains in which the deportees were transported, of
the entrance to Birkenau. (Indeed Lanzmann himself speaks in the France Culture
interview of his admiration for Resnais’s shots of the latrines at Auschwitz.) More
strikingly, Nysenholc goes on to argue for a certain interdependence of the two
films. He suggests that without Night and Fog, Shoah would not have been able to
rely on aural testimonies alone. He claims: “The words in Lanzmann’s film neces-
sarily evoke the images of Night and Fog.”9 As an example, he suggests that the
testimony of Bomba, the barber who cut women’s hair in Treblinka, only holds its
full significance because we have seen images of a sea of hair in Night and Fog. He
argues that there is no total film of the Shoah, that Night and Fog and Shoah com-
plete one another and, further, afford a multiplicity of points of view.
Nysenholc’s argument offers insights into the ways in which Shoah may always
be supplemented by the images, real or fictional, which circulate. Lanzmann may
withhold such images from us on screen but he still goes some way to screening
them in our imagination. However, in arguing for this risky interdependence of the
two films, Nysenholc seems to overlook the fact that any attempt too literally to affix
images to the testimonies of Shoah (as in his example) becomes arguably an act of
defense or self-protection. The image we recall or imagine may be a defense against
the yet unimaginable image of the suffering and death of the Other on which
Lanzmann fixes our minds. Writing about violent images in film more generally,

7. These are shots 281–86 in the shooting script and appear close to the end of Night and Fog. The
images are taken from British news footage filmed at Belsen. See Raskin, Nuit et brouillard by Alain
Resnais, pp. 126–27.
8. Adolphe Nysenholc, “Nuit et Brouillard: Défense et illustration,” in “Alain Resnais,” Contre Brande
9 (2003), ed. Franck Tourret, pp. 11–21. Nysenholc places Resnais’s film alongside Battleship Potemkin
(1925), Grand Illusion (1937), and The Great Dictator (1940) as one of the twentieth-century films that
transcends its time. In this regard he echoes Serge Daney, for whom Night and Fog is “un film juste” and
for whom Resnais is a “seismograph” who, in three works (Night and Fog, Hiroshima mon amour, and
Muriel) has offered unimpeachable testimony to our modernity. See Daney, “Le Travelling de Kapo,”
Persévérance: Entretien avec Serge Toubiana (Paris: P.O.L., 1994), pp. 13–39; Daney, Ciné Journal, Volume II
1983–1986 (Paris: Petite bibliothèque des Cahiers du Cinéma, 1998), p. 28. Following Annette Insdorf,
Nysenholc argues that Night and Fog has remained the film of the (Nazi) genocide.
9. Ibid., p. 13.
92 OCTOBER

Slavoj Zizek argues that violence itself can serve as “a fantasized protective screen.”
He specifies:
Therein lies one of the fundamental lessons of psychoanalysis: the
images of utter catastrophe, far from giving access to the Real, can
function as a protective screen AGAINST the Real. In sex, as well as in
politics, we take refuge in catastrophic scenarios in order to avoid the
actual deadlock (of the impossibility of the sexual relationship, of
social antagonism).10

To summon Resnais’s images of utter catastrophe and bodily torment may be to

screen ourselves against the Real that Lanzmann charges us to encounter through
the very aporias and faultlines of Shoah. Further, Resnais’s images in Night and Fog also
have no clear illustrative or referential function. In this sense Night and Fog has more
in common with Shoah with its absence of images, its suspension of imaging than
Shoah does (as Nysenholc has suggested) with Resnais’s apparent aesthetics.
Night and Fog has been seen to prefigure the ethos of Resnais’s next film,
Hiroshima mon amour (1959), about which screenplay writer Marguerite Duras
famously notes: “All one can do is speak about the impossibility of speaking about
HIROSHIMA.”11 The sense that Night and Fog is a film that troubles visual (and other)
representation has been addressed by a number of critics. Leo Bersani, one of the
strongest analysts of Resnais, writes that Night and Fog, “for all the smoothness of
its visual representation, is constantly setting up obstacles to undisturbed vision.”
He observes: “There are discrepancies between what we see and what we hear,
unemphatic discrepancies that nonetheless have the cumulative effect of irritat-
ing our senses.”12 Libby Saxton pursues such a reading of disturbed vision and
writes of Hiroshima mon amour and Resnais’s later film Muriel (1963): “Both films
depart from the same aporia as Nuit et Brouillard: a self-consciousness about the
impossibility of their project.”13 Indeed it is certainly the case that Cayrol’s com-
mentary distances itself, self-consciously, from the images viewed, drawing
attention to this impossibility. Shot 93 is a color tracking shot of the interior of the
blocks at Birkenau. As we watch, we hear: “These wooden blocks, these tiered
bunks that sleep three abreast, where sleep was a threat, these lairs in which to
seek refuge, to snatch a furtive bite of food. . . . No image, no description can cap-
ture their true dimension of constant fear.”14 In a short text, “De la mort à la vie,”

10. Slavoj Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: University
of Washington/Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000), p. 34.
11. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 10.
12. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 183.
13. Libby Saxton, “Invisible Evidence: Ethical Issues in Filmic Testimony” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Cambridge, 2004), p. 204. Saxton’s broader engagement with Lanzmann influences my argument here
and, like her, I invoke Zizek in this context.
14. Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais, p. 88. Translations from Night and Fog are taken from
the subtitled U.K. video copy.
Material Remains: Night and Fog 93

which is published with the commentary of Night and Fog, Cayrol writes: “memories
are intransmissible.”15 At a further point in Night and Fog, the commentary falters
and falls into silence as Cayrol attempts to describe the uses made of hair, of bones,
and finally of bodies: “with the bodies . . . but words fail.”16 The commentary is
silent for the next five shots (ten seconds of film time). Sylvie Lindeperg writes of
Night and Fog: “this film showed the terrible archive images while integrating them
into an implicit reflection on the limits of the image.”17
Serge Daney describes Resnais not as filmmaker of the imaginary (despite
the director claiming in an interview that the imagination interests him more
than memory per se) but as a scenarist of the unimaginable.18 I, too, argue that
Resnais seeks to know or understand a relation between the unimaginable (the
invisible, the unsayable) and the very matter that remains—the material remains,
the relics and traces of past experience. His films work at that difficult junction
between events that cannot be known, seen, or felt (in their occurrence or in ret-
rospect) and the matter, the images and objects, which seem conversely to offer
material proof and evidence. Matter, materiality, and the senses are crucial in
Resnais’s early filmmaking. Indeed it is through the senses, in particular through a
tactile or haptic engagement with the images displayed, a manipulation of them
(in the full sense of the term), that Resnais comes to mark his viewer and to make
him or her aware of the difficulty and fragility of such evidence.

III

Resnais attempted from the beginning to make a strong impression with

Night and Fog. He says in an interview, “The short films which were made about the
camps in ’45 and ’46 did not reach any public. With Night and Fog, it was my wish to
make a film likely to reach a large audience.”19 Gaston Bounoure quotes Cayrol say-
ing, “When I found myself at home with the pile of photographs from the camps, I
really thought I would go mad.”20 In the France Culture interview, Resnais recounts
that he had nightmares throughout the period of preparation of the film and that
he would wake up screaming. In an interview with Richard Raskin he explains, “it’s

15. Jean Cayrol, “De la mort à la vie,” in Nuit et Brouillard (Paris: Fayard, 1997), p. 59.
16. Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais, p. 123.
17. Sylvie Lindeperg, Clio de 5 à 7. Les Actualités filmées de la Libération: Archives du futur (Paris: CNRS
Éditions, 2000), p. 183.
18. Daney, Ciné Journal, Volume II, 1983–1986, p. 29. Daney is expressing a preference here for early
Resnais, rather than for the later, less successful films such as La vie est un roman (1983) or I Want to Go
Home (1988), which explore the imagination more literally. For Resnais on the imagination rather than
memory (the topos most closely associated with his filmmaking), see Robert Benayoun, “Proust,
jamais!: Entretien avec Alain Resnais,” in Stéphane Goudet, ed., Positif, revue de cinéma: Alain Resnais
(Paris: Gallimard [Folio], 2002), pp. 275–81.
19. Alain Resnais, “Alain Resnais à la question,” Premier Plan 18 (1961), pp. 36–89. Lindeperg dis-
cusses the effect on spectators of viewing the newsreel images on their first release; see Clio de 5 à 7,
p. 165.
20. Gaston Bounoure, “Alain Resnais,” Cinéma d’aujourd’hui 5 (Paris: Seghers, 1974), p. 133.
94 OCTOBER

a film that leaves me deeply ill at ease, yes, still.”21 He reveals something of the feel-
ings underlying this malaise as he details the editing process: “Yes, I remember
evenings (because I was editing the film at night to save time since we were under
such pressure), I had the strange impression that I was manipulating images of
corpses or, what is worse, even of living people—and trying to experiment
formally.”22 The material manipulation or handling of documents—the physical
photographs with which Resnais and Cayrol were faced—brings distress. The sense
is compounded and reflected in the editing process in which the images are physi-
cally and semantically manipulated in the interrelations achieved through montage.
Resnais refers to his work in particular with dead and living bodies. He registers
some uncertainty about the aesthetic effects achieved through manipulation of still
and moving images. Raskin quotes Resnais saying in 1956, “The contrast between
movement and stillness for certain dramatic aspects seems very mannered, I was
even slightly ashamed as I was editing.”23
In Images malgré tout, Didi-Huberman argues for the importance of images of
Auschwitz and from Auschwitz in the attempt to imagine the hell of the camps.
His case is based primarily on four photographs—shreds of evidence—from crema-
torium 5 at Auschwitz. These photographs capture images of the cremation of
gassed bodies and of women pushed toward the gas chamber. Didi-Huberman
writes, “To wrest an image from this, in spite of this? Yes. It was necessary at all
costs to give a form to this unimaginable [horror].”24 He returns to the image as
trace of the real, as evidence. Within his argument against the unrepresentable,
the invisible, he moves beyond these exceptional, indelible images to think other
modes of imaging and representation. Claiming that the reception of Night and
Fog prefigured that of Shoah, he, like Nysenholc, stresses the formal similarities
between the openings of both films. He considers Lindeperg’s discussion of the
film, writing that, for Lindeperg, “the image of the skeletal bodies comes to
‘screen the massacre of healthy women and children, led to the gas chambers as
they left the convoys.’”25 Didi-Huberman counters: “But one cannot reproach a
work for failing to keep a promise it never made: Resnais’s film in no way claimed
to ‘teach us everything’ of the camps and only proposed, more modestly, a means
of access to the inaccessible.”26 Cayrol writes, “Scorned by those who built them,
unimaginable to those within them, the reality of these camps is hard for us to
uncover traces of now.”27 Didi-Huberman’s treatment of Night and Fog, admittedly
brief, takes the form of a strong defense. For him, the film depends on “a shaking

21. Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais, p. 60.

22. Ibid., p. 58.
23. Ibid.
24. Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, p. 21. Resnais made use of one of these images as shot 240 of
Night and Fog (Raskin, Nuit et brouillard by Alain Resnais, p. 119).
25. Ibid., pp. 164–65. The embedded quotation is from Lindeperg, Clio de 5 à 7, p. 183.
26. Ibid., p. 165.
27. Ibid. The quotation from Cayrol accompanies shots 91–95 of the shooting script, in which we
see tracking shots of the camp blocks. See Raskin, Nuit et brouillard by Alain Resnais, pp. 87–88.
Material Remains: Night and Fog 95

up of memory created from a contradiction between the inevitable documents of

history and repeated marks of the present” (his emphasis).28 These marks of the pre-
sent derive from Resnais’s “subjectless” tracking shots, but also from the “testimony,”
written and musical, provided respectively by Cayrol and by Hanns Eisler, music
composer for the film. Didi-Huberman is surely right to consider the film as a
composite whole. As he defends representation and imaging as such, so does he
defend montage and the very construction (and questioning) of meaning through
the editing process in terms that seem entirely apt for Resnais’s use of montage:
“Montage only has value when it does not seek a conclusion or closure too quickly:
when it opens and complicates our apprehension of history, not when it schematizes
abusively.”29 Resnais’s aesthetic project is thus validated: “In his choices of duration
and editing, Resnais achieves this powerful feeling of presence which gives us a
synthetic representation of what ‘a camp’ could be in Nazi Germany.”30
Detailed attention to Resnais is not Didi-Huberman’s project in Images malgré
tout. His broader defense of the value of montage (and refusal to allow the “image-
montage” and “image-mensonge” to coincide) is enabling and exact. Yet a closer
pursuit of Resnais’s tactics and practice as editor—an analysis of the painful work
of manipulation he undertook night by night—reveals a more hesitant, even
tremulous, relation than Didi-Huberman intimates between Resnais’s images and
the inaccessible real he seeks yet to represent. Resnais’s manipulation of images in
Night and Fog, as much as Cayrol’s commentary, betrays an awareness of the extent
to which these images are screening us from the reality of the camps, rather than
screening it for us. This wariness of images, and of their rearrangement, is witnessed
in two particular tropes: in the play of moving and still images (defended despite
Resnais’s comments above) and in attention to the sense of touch (in a move to
privilege the haptic over the optic).

IV

Night and Fog is difficult to grasp in its movement and internal connections:
the mesmerizing, even petrifying force of certain images arrests the viewer, resist-
ing integration of the film into an aesthetic whole. If anything, this effect is only
enhanced by the availability of the film on DVD, in which the viewer can pause
infinitely on certain images before moving on. Readings of the film have neverthe-
less tended to find in it two distinct sets of images, or “sheets of past” in Gilles
Deleuze’s terms: present-day color footage from Auschwitz and Birkenau and
black-and-white archive footage. Resnais’s color tracking shots have drawn much
attention from critics; these shots manifestly foreshadow his moving gaze along
the corridors of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Toute la mémoire du monde (1956),
along the rebuilt streets of Hiroshima in Hiroshima mon amour, and the baroque

28. Ibid., p. 164.

29. Ibid., p. 152.
30. Ibid., p. 164.
96 OCTOBER

walls of the palaces in Last Year in Marienbad (1961).31 The relation of the black-
and-white shots of Night and Fog to Resnais’s filmmaking more broadly also deserves
attention, however, as does the very diversity of the material edited together.
The first set of black-and-white images comes as shots 6–16. Resnais shows
images from German news footage intercut with shots by Leni Riefenstahl from
Triumph of the Will (1934). Emphasis here is on movement. Shot 5 has offered a
tracking shot from Birkenau against which we hear the commentary, “No current
passes through the wires, no step is heard but ours.”32 This evocation of the step
and tread is the brutal point of transition to shot 6, in which we see German sol-
dier s marching in step, followed by further foot age of soldier s in shot 7
accompanied by the words, “The machine gets underway.”33 Resnais offers a
mechanized image of Nazism as infernal machine, corroborated by the rhythm of
Eisler’s music. The contemplative, slow movement of the tracking shots at
Birkenau is interrupted by the intrusion of past mechanization and film footage.
Shots 17–41 show Resnais introducing a further strategy, in which he now edits
together a series of photographic images that show the architectural styles of the
camps. As one still image replaces another, the commentary begins to summon
the names of random vict ims: Stern, a Jewish student from Amsterdam;
Schmulszki, a shopkeeper from Krakow; Annette, a schoolgirl from Bordeaux.
Despite the act of naming—and the immense registers of names we see later in
the film—no attempt is made to follow a personal trajectory, not even that of
Cayrol. Yet in the last still shots of this sequence, Resnais introduces images of
individuals, apparently making visible the deportees’ experience. Resnais lingers
on each of these shots for four seconds, slotting them into the frame so that they
hold our attention for a few moments only to be displaced by further images. The
passage of the shots is too fast for the viewer to be able to linger on their detail
(unless he or she chooses to pause); the even pace of the editing allows no shot to
claim priority. Instead the move from shot to shot appears to hint at some narra-
tive development, as if one image will succeed and substantiate its predecessor, as
if Resnais is moving toward narration or even animation in his editing of still
images.
The sequence begins with the famous photograph of an arrest in Warsaw, a
child’s hands raised, Nazi soldiers in the background. The image, arguably
staged, is still and is also iconic. Resnais props it up against other still images of

31. Critics have in fact responded rather differently to the tracking shots in Night and Fog.
Benayoun suggests the shots become tools in Resnais’s act of inquisition. For Pinel, the slow glide of
the camera works to animate a still (dead) setting. Annette Insdorf offers a more melancholy, cautious
reading, countering that “while confronting and investigating, this fluid camera suggests transience, or
the license of smooth mobility that can exist only after the fact.” See Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais
arpenteur de l’imaginaire (Paris: Stock/Cinéma, 1980), p. 54. Quotations from Pinel and Insdorf come
from texts reproduced by Raskin in Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais (pp. 145, 147).
32. Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais, p. 74.
33. Ibid.
Material Remains: Night and Fog 97

deportees. There seems to be a direct relation between the first image here and
the commentary: “Rounded up in Warsaw.”34 Then Resnais cuts to an overhead
shot of deportees beneath a clock: “Deported from Lodz, Prague, Brussels,
Athens . . . ”;35 he cuts to a closer shot of a man and woman among other depor-
tees as the voice-over continues: “Zagreb, Odessa, or Rome.”36 The editing gives
the illusion that we are coming in closer to this particular group, yet the voice-
over disrupts any connection between the images seen and a particular place. We
see a handful of images; what is evoked in the film is a calamity across Europe.
These few images attempt to refer to that calamity but in no sense represent it.
The narrative movement of the sequence is arrested by the move onward to the
shot of prisoners interned at Pithiviers and guarded by a French gendarme.37
Like the Warsaw shot, this image seems more self-consciously posed and pictor-
ial, with the window frame within the shot and the gendarme in the foreground
observing the scene. As the film seems to tend for a moment toward narrative,
Resnais breaks any flow by drawing attention to each image as a disparate, framed
picture. The film creates an effect for the spectator by this tension between flow
and its arrest.
Shots 40 and 41 offer other still images of the deportation in France with an
overhead shot of people waiting for transportation at the Vel d’Hiv, followed by an
image of “captured resistants at Compiègne.”38 The shot of the Vel d’Hiv captures
what seems an unstaged moment frozen in time. We see women sitting in clusters,
their belongings around them. The shot also reveals several women in motion as they
walk up the alley of the enclosure. Shot 41, at Compiègne, closes in on a group of
resistance workers, showing them herded along under guard. The still photograph
shows them at a moment as they walk to an unknown destination offscreen left.
Despite its stillness, the image captures chance movement, a backward glance. The
still photographs anticipate movement, looking toward the shock of the transition
from shot 41 to 42. In the crucial moment toward which we have been moving,
Resnais cuts from still photo to documentary footage, here German news footage,
borrowed from a Polish documentary.39 The figures in the footage are of the same
size and scale as in the previous still photograph. They are also seen walking in the
same direction. In this transition from stasis to movement Resnais fulfills the viewer’s

34. These words are inexplicably missing in Raskin’s shooting script, but the frame is described
on p. 78.
35. Ibid., p. 78.
36. Ibid.
37. This image was censored on the first release of the film. In a telephone call to Resnais the cen-
sors requested that the image be cut because it might be offensive in the eyes of the present-day (1955)
military. The image was shot at the concentration camp at Pithiviers, one of the two main concentra-
tion camps for foreign-born Jews arrested in France. In the lefthand corner of the frame an officer can
be seen surveying the camp from a watchtower. His képi signals his French nationality. Resnais resisted
censorship. A compromise was reached: the frame remained but a beam was superimposed over the
figure.
38. Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais, p. 79.
39. Ibid., p. 80.
98 OCTOBER

(painful) wish to see these figures as animate, as living and moving. It is as if the
photograph itself is animated, achieving the move from stillness to motion that is
achieved in the development of cinema as art form (and commemorated, for exam-
ple, by Chris Marker in La Jetée [1962]). These formal similarities between the still
photograph and film footage Resnais selects here enhance this illusion of anima-
tion and announce a hesitation between stillness and movement which, despite
Resnais’s misgivings, is integral to the function and effect of Night and Fog.
Alternating stillness and movement reminds us of the limited power and referen-
tiality of the still photographs. The very pace of the deportees as they pass in shot
42, the different relations between them instantiated and briefly glimpsed, are
missing in shot 41. Shot 42 is all the more intense as the moving footage emerges
from the evenly edited still photographs. Straining to see and know, we watch these
animate crowds of individuals who are yet like Barthes’s condemned man in
Camera Lucida, both dead and condemned to die.40
Resnais now edits together a series of moving images of assembled depor-
tees. The still photographs have led to this animation, which leads in turn to a
piecing together of images of individuals on the railway platforms, packed into
wagons and cattletrucks. There is no sense that movement has simply superceded
stillness. One shot (46), though motion-picture footage, is an almost still frame in
which a woman sits frozen and immobile staring into space (a man behind her
looks directly into the lens of the camera). We see the footage for just three
seconds; our sense of what is still and what is moving is unsettled by the woman’s
numbness, her disregard, her catatonic state. The relation of the object filmed to
the medium of representation is brought into question; here a woman seems only
barely animate even on film. Such hesitation, such uncertainty, key to the aes-
thetic experimentation of Night and Fog, infests Resnais’s later editing of shots of
the Muselmann.
In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben, in part following Primo Levi, argues that
“the complete witness . . . is the one we cannot see: the Muselmann.”41 He contin-
ues, “In the Muselmann, the impossibility of bearing witness is no longer a mere
privation. Instead, it has become real; it exists as such. If the survivor bears witness
not to the gas chambers or to Auschwitz but to the Muselmann, if he speaks only
on the basis of an impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be
denied.”42 To substantiate these claims, Agamben draws new attention to the fig-
ure of the Muselmann; this itself is of undoubted significance whether or not his
broader argument is accepted. Drawing on texts by Jean Améry, Levi, and others,
Agamben writes that the death of the Muselmann had begun before that of his
body. The Muselmann is described as a staggering corpse, as a mummy-man, as the
living dead. He notes: “‘Finally, you confuse the living and the dead,’ writes a witness

40. See Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire (Paris: Seuil, 1980), pp. 148–51.
41. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 162.
42. Ibid., p. 164.
Material Remains: Night and Fog 99

of Bergen-Belsen. ‘Basically, the difference is minimal anyhow. We’re skeletons

that are still moving; and they’re skeletons that are already immobile. But there’s
even a third category: the ones who lie stretched out, unable to move, but still
breathing slightly.’”43
Agamben considers the impossibility of gazing upon the Muselmann:
Other witnesses confirm this impossibilit y of gazing upon the
Muselmann. One account is particularly eloquent, even if it is indirect.
A few years ago, the English film shot in Bergen-Belsen immediately
after the camp’s liberation in 1945 was made available to the public. It
is difficult to bear the sight of the thousands of naked corpses piled in
common graves or carried on the shoulders of former camp guards, of
those tortured bodies that even the SS could not name (we know from
witnesses that under no circumstances were they to be called “corpses”
or “cadavers,” but rather simply Figuren, figures, dolls). And yet since
the Allies intended to use this footage as proof of the Nazi atrocities
and make it public in Germany, we are spared no detail of the terrible
spectacle. At one point, however, the camera lingers almost by accident
on what seem to be living people, a group of prisoners crouched on
the ground or wandering on foot like ghosts. It lasts only a few sec-
onds, but it is still long enough for the spectator to realize that they are
either Muselmänner who have survived by some miracle or, at least, pris-
oners very close to the state of Muselmänner. With the exception of
Carpi’s drawings, which he did from memory, this is perhaps the sole
image of Muselmänner we have. Nevertheless, the same cameraman who
had until then patiently lingered over naked bodies, over the terrible
“dolls” dismembered and stacked one on top of another, could not
bear the sight of these half-living beings; he immediately began once
again to show the cadavers. As Elias Canetti has noted, a heap of dead
bodies is an ancient spectacle, one which has often satisfied the power-
ful. But the sight of the Muselmänner is an absolutely new phenomenon,
unbearable to human eyes.44

Resnais, in Night and Fog, contends with the possibility of presenting this
image to us as unbearable. Shot 164 is an image of a Muselmann (designated as
such in the shooting script) wrapped in a blanket. He is standing but skeletal, his
eyes shut. The next shot shows a man lying, his eyes open but unfixed on any
object, his body wrecked and huddled in blankets. Shot 166 shows a deportee
supported by his comrades. His pose is contorted, his mouth open in pain as his
head hangs to one side. Each of these images captures a still shot of an individual
near death. The death-bearing image captures a moment of transition that is

43. Ibid., p. 54.

44. Ibid., p. 51.
 100 OCTOBER

unthinkable, a moment in which the division between life and death, body and
corpse, is all but denied. Before we assimilate these images, Resnais again disrupts
any fixed or full contemplation. Cutting to color tracking shots, the camera takes
us toward the hospital at Auschwitz, then cuts to footage filmed for French news-
reel. We see men in agony on the hospital beds, contorted limbs raised, barely
covered by blankets. What appears to be another still photograph in its composi-
tion and framing proves to be live footage. The bare movement of a figure
breathing in the opening of the sequence signals this (the image reminiscent of
Wolfgang Sofsky’s words cited above by Agamben) and the desperate life of these
men is figured as movement, as a pulse and a breath, as the flickering of eyelids.
In the last shot in the sequence (174), Resnais abruptly inserts a still image of a
man with his eyes wide open. Despite the rigor of his pose, the contorted facial
expression suggests he is still alive; the difference between his body and those we
see in the previous live footage is that the photograph stills him and fixes him,
leaving us bereft of the bare movement of the previous images. In these moves
between still images and live footage Resnais registers formally the category distur-
bance inherent in the figure of the Muselmann (as described by Agamben).
Later, the film shows a series of still images of the dead at Auschwitz. These
immediately follow present-day shots within the gas chamber. A close-up on a
woman’s face is reminiscent of the distorted pose of the Muselmann, of the dying
gaze in shot 174 (as we see the mirroring relations between the dying and the
dead). Resnais edits in shots of massed bodies, with sentient flesh now invulnerable
and unmoving. Indeed Resnais continues to assert the horror of this change of
state. In live footage from Soviet newsreel he shows corpses burned. A close-up

Right and facing page:

Alain Resnais. From
Night and Fog. 1955.
Material Remains: Night and Fog 101

from this footage shows the charred corpse of a man, his form in material that
seems unrecognizable as flesh, yet his pose and expression a remainder of his
human shape and life. The image of the man’s head is disturbingly reminiscent of a
shot of the face of a statue, pitted, damaged in Les Statues meurent aussi. In response
to the shock of this similarity, as we fight against this disavowal of human sentience
and form, Resnais newly sensitizes us to the once living state of the human effigies
in Night and Fog. In tracking shots of corpses piled on a funeral pyre, collapsed
among logs, it is the dialectic of similarity and difference that again brings the
force of the image. The pale faces of the dead, their mortified bodies, eerily resem-
ble the logs among which they lie. (The shot may recall previous images Resnais
has used in Night and Fog as markers of man’s resistance in the camp: carved mari-
onnettes and monsters made by camp inmates.) Yet in the face of this obscene
similarity between flesh and wood (reminiscent of the Nazi euphemisms cited by
Agamben), the viewer responds with horror at the human forms glimpsed, the
faces and hands. One man seems to hide his face. In an image of extreme pathos,
the last figure glimpsed seems crouched on his side, as if asleep. As the divide
between living and dead, and between once animate and always inanimate matter
is eroded—as human matter seems dead material—we are reminded of the obscen-
ity of this transition, of the shock of animation or at least of human recognition.
This shock, the visceral register for the viewer, is key, too, to Resnais’s notori-
ous use of Allied footage from Belsen (shots 272–92). While this material is taken
from live footage, Resnais edits it at first in a manner recalling his use of still pho-
tos. We see each image for only a matter of seconds, again with a sense of the
recrudescence of desecration and outrage with every image. The bodies—dead
102 OCTOBER

and often decaying (we see a putrid empty eye socket)—are still. The editing of
the shots allows them to appear framed in still photographs. Yet Resnais pushes
further, cutting from a woman’s dead face in close-up to shots of the bodies moved
by bulldozers. These images bring with them a fearful return of vulnerability as the
flesh moved seems again fragile and pliable. Horror again arises, for the most part
from the subject of the images, yet also from their tendency to disturb categories.
What was still is now moving once more; the false piety of the camera’s commemo-
ration of still bodies is disrupted again as the bodies, the remnants of human
matter, offer a grotesque image of mobility. There is a fearsome restlessness in
Resnais’s editing of these images, an insistence that the viewing process will be
unsettled, unresolved, far from complacent.
These are not Resnais’s shots; he does not author them, but in his editing of
them he brings us to a new relation with their subjects. As we make category
errors, mistaking the living and dying for the dead, mistaking live footage for still
images, our relation to the images seen is disturbed. Fear insists in the inability to
distinguish stillness from movement, living from dead matter. Resnais brings an
uncanny hesitation to the viewing process in which stillness and motion interrupt
each other, in which images and footage are interposed one upon another with an
inexorability and rhythm that become nauseating and sick. These images, and the
formal play of stillness and movement created from them, do not claim to repre-
sent the Muselmann to us. Rather, in riskily imitating the cognitive disturbance
and impossibility that the Muselmann embodies, Resnais moves to make the images
of his film unassimilable, ungraspable, despite their attention to matter and brute
materiality. Resnais thus instills a distrust in the image, illustrating for us quite
literally the faults and failings of the viewing process, the manipulations that can
be achieved in editing. This is not even yet a question of the reliability and veracity
(or otherwise) of the newsreel footage that Resnais reframes in Night and Fog.
Whether or not the images captured are authentic or staged, Resnais edits those
images together in a bid to unsettle how and what we see, to make the visceral
shudder of the indeterminacy of living and dead matter, a moment of unknowing
and undoing of the viewer, key to the viewing of the film.

In the closing moments of the film, Resnais shows three shots of corpses, the
bodies contorted, massed, the structure of their bones designating them as human
matter. Each shot lasts for six seconds. In the third there is a full, expressive image
of a man, his arm outstretched, his head tilted back. To some degree the image
resembles a detail of a torso from Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Resnais’s last
image of outrage and bodily damage is pictorial in its picking out of this single
man and the desperate exposure of his body and outreach of his gesture. His
impulse in Night and Fog, however reluctantly, is to make art. He returns to the
vocabulary of manipulation as he discusses the issue with Raskin: “So there was
Material Remains: Night and Fog 103

another problem which was the form of the film: how can you manipulate such a
subject?”45 Continuing, he observes, “So since I am a formalist, perhaps I have to
overcome my scruples and attempt to experiment formally in this film, despite its
subject.”46 Later in the interview he comments on the interest that surrounded
Night and Fog and the numbers who saw the film and suggests simply: “perhaps you
have to experiment formally for people to notice something.”47
In “De la mort à la vie,” Cayrol envisages the possibility of art in response to
the Holocaust. He names this art “lazarean,” describing it as “an art arising directly
from such a human convulsion.”48 In creating such “lazarean” art in Night and Fog,
Resnais focuses materially, as we have seen, on the trope of the living dead, on the
body mortified and resuscitated, allowing his images to oscillate between petrifica-
tion and the illusion of reanimation. His film depends on the editing, the
manipulation of images of suffering and of desecrated bodies. His film in some
senses cannot be divorced from a deadly productivity in which the body, and its suf-
fering, are made into art.
Night and Fog itself details the uses made of bodies and body parts in the
infernal productivity of the camps. (As Charles Krantz writes: “Bones, human hair,
body fat, nothing is to be ‘wasted.’”)49 Resnais shows images from the museum at
Auschwitz of piles of assembled objects: spectacles, garments, shoes massed
together in random arrangement, their very abundance detracting from the
specificity of the items. Charting this act of amassing, Resnais continues to broach
the subject of obscenity. From clothes in shot 251, the camera moves in shot 252
to witness unfathomable, inchoate masses of women’s hair—lifeless, dead matter.
The camera moves over the hair, its masses filling the frame so its substance and
nature loses any sense or identification. Moving relentlessly from the hair to pack-
ets in which it is sold, to the ghastly fabric into which it is transformed (panning
across the rolls of fabric, their human fibers catching the light), Resnais closes in
on matter and its metamorphosis; shots of massed bones are followed by formally
similar, treacherously benign, shots of cabbages fertilized by human matter. We see
the blocks of soap made from human fat, the stretched skins of human victims. In Le
Chant du styrène, as Edward Dimendberg has argued, Resnais takes us backward
through the production process, from the plastic products to the oil that is their
component, to the nexus of exploitation on which the very productivity of the
plastic factory depends. In Night and Fog, this imbrication of productivity with
human suffering, exploitation, and political sovereignty is viciously evident in the
denatured forms of the human products of the camps. Night and Fog may itself

45. Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais, p. 52.

46. Ibid., p. 52. Resnais continues here to discuss his use of interposed color and black-and-white
cinematography, but does not offer further analysis of other formal experimentation in Night and Fog.
47. Ibid., p. 59.
48. Cayrol, “De la mort à la vie,” pp. 51–52.
49. Krantz, “Teaching Night and Fog: History and Historiography,” p. 3.
104 OCTOBER

recycle images of the body, Resnais may manipulate the matter he chooses, yet
such productivity is used to decry its malign counterpart.
As in his experimentation with still and moving images, so more broadly
Resnais is concerned to unsettle his viewer (to irritate our senses in Bersani’s
terms) and, in particular, to bring us close to the matter, substance, and affect of
the images he manipulates. He seeks indeed to make the image distressingly
manipulable, tangible, sentient, graspable. This is a paradoxical, even impossible
task in the visual medium that is cinema. Indeed one way in which Night and Fog
works to remind us of the very ungraspability and invisibility of its subject is
through its privileging, at points, of the haptic over the optic.
Laura Marks argues that many works of intercultural cinema “evoke memo-
ries both individual and cultural, through an appeal to nonvisual knowledge,
embodied knowledge, and experiences of the senses, such as touch, smell, taste.”50
In particular she is concerned with the ways certain images appeal to a “haptic, or
tactile, visuality.”51 Such images invite the viewer to respond in an embodied way.
Key to Marks’s thinking is that “many works of intercultural cinema begin from
the inability to speak, to represent objectively one’s own culture, history, and
memory; they are marked by silence, absence, and hesitation. All these works are
marked by a suspicion of visuality, a lack of faith in the visual archive’s ability to
represent cultural memory.”52 Appeal to the haptic, to the senses and embodied
knowledge, originates for Marks in this hesitation, this suspicion of visuality. She is
clear in her study that her argument is specific to intercultural cinema; neverthe-
less the effect of her disclosure of the sensory textures of cinema as medium, and
the appeal of her linking of such material filmmaking with hidden, unseen,
denied histories, may tempt us to transfer her findings to other contexts. Resnais
is even briefly mentioned by Marks when she speaks about the critique of ethno-
graphic visuality. She argues: “Trinh’s films Re: Assemblage (1982) and Surname Viet
Given Name Nam (1989), like Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982), Claude Lanzmann’s
Shoah (1985), Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), and Peter Kubelka’s
Unsere Afrikareise (1961–66), use both poetic and aggressive strategies to compel
the viewer to consider the destructive effects of believing that one can know
another culture or another time through visual information alone.”53 In Hiroshima
mon amour, but also in Night and Fog and through his early documentaries, Resnais
appears indeed to register the limits of visual information alone and, in line with
the intercultural cinema Marks analyzes, to seek instead possibilities of a tactile

50. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2000), p. 2.
51. Ibid., p. 2. Giuliana Bruno offers a different, scintillating, and imaginative investigation of the
haptic properties of film in Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso,
2002). Her further emphasis on the haptic as it relates to movement through space offers suggestive
possibilities for thinking Resnais and the haptic (and she herself draws on Hiroshima mon amour and
Last Year in Marienbad).
52. Ibid., p. 21.
53. Ibid., p. 134.
Material Remains: Night and Fog 105

visuality in a bid to change our relation to the image viewed and to find a more
prescient, sensitive, even prehensile mode of representation.
Resnais’s interest in touch and the image of hands and tactile contact has
readily drawn comment from critics, in particular in discussion of Hiroshima mon
amour.54 Following Marks, we may also want to stretch our apprehension of the
haptic beyond such literal images of contact. Referring to Deleuze’s reading of
Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) in terms of the haptic, she writes: “To me,
Deleuze’s focus on filmic images of hands seems a bit unnecessary in terms of
evoking a sense of the haptic. Looking at hands would seem to evoke the sense of
touch through identification, either with the person whose hands they are or with
the hands themselves. The haptic bypasses such identification and the distance
from the image it requires.”55 For Marks, prohaptic properties in video and film
might be seen to be changes in focus, graininess, effects of underexposure and
overexposure. She sees these techniques discouraging the viewer from distinguish-
ing objects and encouraging a relation to the screen as a whole. She speaks more
generally of sensuous effects achieved through haptic imagery in combination
with sound, camera movement, and montage; she speaks more specifically of the
use of tactile close-ups. Marks is concerned with film (and video) as material, both
in terms of what they represent and as media in themselves, and observes that film
and video become more haptic as they die, as we witness their gradual decay.
Optical printing, solarization, and scratching the emulsion are all seen to work
with the very physical surface of the medium. In words which seem to resonate
with Resnais’s concerns over Night and Fog, if not his visual tactics, she adds, “film
can be actually worked with the hands.”56
Marks’s work may sensitize us to the haptic in Night and Fog; yet this may be to
reveal the ways in which it is through touch and through the material properties of
the medium that Resnais reflects (still) on the impossibility of representation. We
move from the manipulation of editing—and the visceral shudder of animation—
as explored in the previous section to new, disturbing appeals to an embodied
spectator.
As mentioned above, readings of Night and Fog distinguish color footage shot
in 1955 by Resnais and black-and-white archive footage of the “past.” Raskin’s
reassembled shooting script designates sequences of shots as either “present” or
“past.” Yet such demarcation is not entirely adequate. In his use of black-and-white
images Resnais intercuts still photographs and newsreel footage, as we have seen.
More controversially, he also uses feature-film footage from Wanda Jakubowska’s

54. See, for example, Jean-Louis Leutrat’s discussion of the tactile in his study Hiroshima mon amour
(Paris: Nathan, 1994).
55. Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 171. Marks refers to Deleuze’s reading in Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps
(Paris: Minuit, 1985), p. 22.
56. Ibid., p. 173. The first “past” images we see in Night and Fog, Pathé Gaumont newsreel (shot 6 in
the script), are physically damaged so that we see staining and scratches on the celluloid. The image is
at times partial and obscured on the screen. Resnais appears to draw attention to the tactile, perish-
able materiality of the medium from the start.
106 OCTOBER

The Last Stage (1948).57 Beyond this, there is black-and-white footage that is
uncredited in Raskin’s shooting script and which appears to have been shot by
Resnais himself.58 The shots I would isolate have been filmed at Auschwitz and are
shots of objects, artifacts, and remains (for example, shots 74–90, 156–58, 191–95,
and 252). There is marked visual similarity between these shots and the images of
the museum objects and statues filmed in Les Statues meurent aussi. These are shots
that precisely privilege materiality and the tactile.
The first image in the sequence made up by shots 74–90 is a close-up of a pair
of staring eyes (accompanied in the commentary by the words: “First impression:
the camp is another planet”).59 This image anticipates the shots we see later of the
man dying with his eyes wide open (shot 174); in this way the image grotesquely fits
and generates one of the image threads of the film. Yet the image is disjunctive
here too. Such a close-up, in which we see the eyes and nose alone, seems reminis-
cent of Surrealist photography, of it s fragment at ion of the body and
transformation of the architecture of the human.60 The scale of the image, its
shock appearance, isolate it from the preceding images of Night and Fog. From the
shooting script we learn that the image is a close-up of an identity photo from the
museum at Auschwitz. Looking closely, we see the faint ink of a stamp over the fig-
ure’s r ight eye. Scratches on the photograph are also visible in the frame,
emphasizing its tangibility, the fact that it has been touched (even damaged) in
transit. This image “represents” a first view of the camp. Resnais shows eyes that
seem to stare blindly (like dead eyes later). He draws attention immediately to the
materiality of the image and the memories or traces that may thus be evoked as we
reckon with this image as document, as material evidence of the anterior presence
of this individual at Auschwitz. Later, in shots 191–94, Resnais will show close-ups of
hands opening—manipulating—an Italian passport from Maïdenek. He closes in
on the photographs of Dutch identity papers and a French passport in which we
see the full image of an individual’s face, the stamp and the very fingerprints, the
tactile imprint of the individual.
The close-up of the eyes instantiates a tension between Resnais’s artistic
endeavor—his creation of forms, of patterns—and the matter, both the subject
and its very remnants and remains, which he manipulates. Key here is a move to
make this material disorienting, uncanny, when it seems reminiscent of the patterns

57. Images from The Last Stage appear as shot 71 (a shot of the arrival of a train at Auschwitz in
Night and Fog [Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais, p. 83]) and shot 155 (p. 100).
58. Vincent Pinel comments on this in an IDHEC (Institut des hautes études cinématographiques)
‘Fiche filmographique’ on Night and Fog, reproduced by Raskin, pp. 142–46. But in asserting that some
of the black-and-white shots appear to have been filmed by Resnais, Pinel cites as one of his examples
the evocation of the arrival at the camps (which, as we saw above, is in fact extracted from The Last
Stage).
59. Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais, p. 84.
60. Several critics comment on Resnais’s early interest in Surrealism and on the proximity between
some of his images and Surrealist art works. See Bounoure, Alain Resnais, and Benayoun, Alain Resnais
arpenteur de l’imaginaire. For further discussion of Surrealist photography and the architecture of the
human, see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993).
Material Remains: Night and Fog 107

and experimentation of Western art, yet also shockingly unrecognizable as it

refers to actual human experience. From the close-up of the identity photograph,
the film cuts to an overhead shot of hundreds of naked men assembled. The
change in scale gives a small echo of the incommensurability of these images in
relation to perceptions of human identity and experience. Resnais returns to an
extreme close-up of a man with his head shaved, his eyes only just within the
frame. This returning, disorienting image opens into a series of extreme close-
ups, arguably filmed by Resnais himself. In shot 79 we see a man’s arm tattooed.
His forearm crosses the frame (looking forward to the angular body shots of the
opening of Hiroshima mon amour) and his marked skin (recalling the ink over the
photographic image) is contrasted in color and texture to the rough, striped gar-
ments he wears. That this is live footage, that we see a certain hesitant motion,
further unsettles our relation to the image, presumably its status as reconstruction
yet its very palpability. In shots 80–82, Resnais’s camera comes closer still to the
remnants from the camps. Where we see a number stitched to a garment, the cam-
era is close enough for us to see distinctly the individual threads of the uneven
sewing, the imprint of the handwritten letters on fabric. The sewn insignia of
these shots is brought up close before our eyes as material evidence, all but tangible
proof as hinted by the scale of Resnais’s footage.
In later shots Resnais offers images of objects made in the camps. An upward
tracking shot reveals a carved puppet of Hitler lying along a wooden beam (previ-
ously we have seen tracking shots of the beams in the blocks). The film cuts to a
shot of a carved crocodile; its life-size scale of the image and shading, quite apart
from its physical form, make it resemble the shots of animal sculptures of Les
Statues meurent aussi. The film cuts then to a box, half open, again seen in large
scale. Resnais shows the handiwork of the camp prisoners. In his close-ups, filmed
we assume with his own hands, Resnais conveys something of the tangibility and
texture of these objects, both the markers of deathly codification—the tattoo, the
insignia—and the markers of human resistance and creativity. The filming of
these objects brings a set of images with a different scale and presence to Night
and Fog. These are images that respect and reflect the three-dimensionality of the
objects filmed, the material evidence and presence they provide. These images
may not entirely belong to the categories of the haptic that Marks outlines, but
they summon, nevertheless, a tactile appreciation of their surface and substance.
In summoning these objects and their material presence Resnais seeks to bring us
up close to a hidden, denied, dematerialized history. He makes it present to us
through shots that disrupt the demarcation of past and present in the film; they
are in black and white, thus aligned pictorially with the “past” in Raskins’s sense
and with the archive footage. Yet with no documentary source, and apparently
filmed by Resnais, they are more properly present images of past evidence that
insists, remains present, obtrudes in its very materiality.
Filming in black and white at Auschwitz, Resnais silently aligns Night and Fog
with his earlier documentary films, Van Gogh (1948), Gauguin (1949), and
108 OCTOBER

Guernica, as well as Les Statues meurent aussi; he refers us implicitly to his previous
tactics for thinking of art and trauma in tandem. In Guernica Resnais constructs a
response to the 1937 bombing via a text by Paul Éluard and collaged images from
Picasso (the Guernica painting primarily, but also a number of other paintings). At
moments he makes the painted figures emerge out of dark backgrounds in an
attempt to offer an illusion of animation to still images. As he represents the
bombing itself, he uses extremely rapid editing; Picasso’s frantic animal images,
bulls, horses, and contorted human figures flash in front of our eyes. Resnais
shows shots of hands, of mouths, of tongues. In images of body parts, Resnais
recalls sentient flesh (which he will show literally in Night and Fog), but all he
shows us is its fine, aesthetic afterimage. These morbid, mobile images hide the
reality of Guernica as they also point to its horror. They function simultaneously as
both testimony and veil.
Resnais displays ambivalence toward art; his very early documentaries all rep-
resent and animate the work of modern painters, but after Guernica he does not
return to this enterprise. He moves on from the two dimensions of painting to the
three-dimensional spectacle of the museum space. Resnais is wary of it, though
clearly fascinated by its structures. In Hiroshima mon amour, the French woman can
see nothing at Hiroshima, despite her four visits to the museum. Both Les Statues
meurent aussi and Hiroshima mon amour present shots of museum visitors faced with
models in miniature, decontextualized objects behind panes of glass. In sending
his protagonist and camera out onto the streets in Hiroshima, in circling the stat-
ues in Les Statues meurent aussi and imagining something of their history and
reference, Resnais seeks a more mobile, three-dimensional, even haptic encounter
with history and its material relics than the conventional museum provides. His
filming of objects might be aligned, indeed, with Andreas Huyssen’s reflections
on the new possibilities of the museal gaze. Huyssen speaks of the register of
reality the object carries, and the ways in which the gaze at museal things resists
the progressive dematerialization of the world.61 This move depends on circula-
tion around objects, on the mobilization of memories in a site of contestation and
negotiation. Such moves seem to motivate Resnais’s filming of objects in Night and
Fog, in particular in his bid to bring us up close to objects, to animate them and
bring them out from behind glass.
Resnais’s approach to the tactile is, however, more ambivalent than this
account so far suggests. As with the filming of the hair in the museum at
Auschwitz, Resnais’s filming of a material substance—human clippings—allows us
no purchase on the matter shown. The camera is mobile, ambulatory, but as the
hair entirely fills the frame, the image exceeds our grasp (both physical and cogni-
tive). There is no frame, no explanatory context, for such a mass of shorn hair,
and the image—which has appeared horribly tactile—morphs into unassimilable

61. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge,
1995).
Material Remains: Night and Fog 109

abstraction. At the end of Night and Fog, after the three parting images of the
dead, one reminiscent of Géricault, Resnais cuts to color footage of marshes,
which is suddenly disorienting in its form and scale (shot 303). We see marsh
waters in liquid, glaucous patterns, tranquil perhaps yet distressing as we fear what
they cover, as their mass and texture may subliminally recall bodily mess and exc-
reta. Coming closer to Marks’s notion of the haptic, Resnais offers us images over
which we have no mastery. In their move toward abstraction, they challenge the
viewer to suspend the desire to make sense and to respond instead with the senses.
As they fill the screen, these images equally screen us from the previous images of
the camps; they appear to draw attention to their own screening status as they
obstruct our view and suspend reference. The haptic, with its sensory presence, its
large scale, and enveloping of the screen impedes our vision and reminds us of all
that cannot be seen.

VI

In the textures of these late images and their insistent tracking to the right,
Resnais recalls a scene that will draw to a close this argument. In shot 237, at
Maïdenek, Resnais takes his camera inside the gas chamber. The camera pans over
the ceiling of the chamber, and the image shows concrete imprinted, damaged, by
human presence. A voice-over narrates: “The only traces now, if you know what
they are, are on the ceiling. Scrabbling nails scoring even concrete.”62 There is an
explicit relation between the voice-over and the shots. The voice-over here serves
an explanatory function. Yet, as the camera moves over this scarred concrete, in a
single shot tracking this palpable record, the relation between the human mark-
ings and the atrocity to which they bear witness, and of which they offer material
proof, challenges rationality and sense-making. In his move between animate and
inert matter, Resnais offers evidence in the form of grotesquely malleable concrete.
The gouging of this seemingly adamant substance, and the oxymoron it embodies,
challenges and nauseates the viewer. We have no purchase on these images,
images that are abusively tactile, a record of the deathly, devastating imprint of
dying hands on concrete. Resnais brings us up close to these images. He presents
us with this literal imprint, following the logic of his presentation of material
traces and remains throughout his filmmaking. Expressly tactile, formally reminis-
cent of a number of other shots within the film, these images are nevertheless
radically disjunctive, obtrusive, unassimilable as we resist letting them make sense,
as we resist the category disturbance they represent. Grazing the surface of the
concrete, letting the human marks that remain fill the screen, Resnais’s filming
signals these marks as untouchable, unassimilable. Lack of mastery over the image
may be signaled as the haptic is privileged over the optic; as used by Resnais such

62. Raskin, Nuit et brouillard by Alain Resnais, p. 117.

110 OCTOBER

haptic images, however close they come to the matter they represent, remind us
heavily of the untouchability and intractibility of this traumatic past. This image
in Night and Fog within the gas chamber takes us back to Lanzmann’s comments.
Resnais shows us imprints in concrete, which remain cavities, fissuring his film
and its moves toward reference. From within the gas chamber he reminds us that
we can neither touch nor look on this.