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Journal of European Studies
Viewing memory through Night and Fog, The
Sorrow and the Pity and Shoah
NELLY FURMAN
Cornell University
Between 1955 and 1983, three French film documentaries displaced
our understanding of the events of World War II: Nuit et brouillard
by Alain Resnais, Le Chagrin et la pitié by Marcel Ophuls and
Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. These are films that reveal specific
moments in France’s difficult path to assessing the events of the ‘dark
years’. As markers of changes in the political, social and cultural
attitude of France’s views of the war and Vichy, these films offer
probing historical evidence of France’s struggles with its past, as well
as compelling archival materials on the deportations, the occupation
and the Holocaust. But, in addition, they also present us with
exceptional illustrations of the vicissitudes of recollections, the
unpredictable workings of memory, and the vicarious effects of visual
and oral testimonies. They in turn testify to a contemporary cultural
event: the displacement of traditional history in favour of testimony.
Keywords: Le Chagrin et la pitié, memory, Nuit et brouillard,
Shoah, World War II
‘Pourquoi faut-il que l’historicité soit toujours pensée comme oubli?’
Michel Foucault, March 1963 (2001: 31)
Between 1955 and 1985, three French films: Alain Resnais’ Nuit et
brouillard, Marcel Ophuls’s Le Chagrin et la pitié and Claude
Lanzmann’s Shoah were each hailed, when they were first viewed, as
Journal of European Studies 35(2): 169–185 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com [200506] 0047-2441/10.1177/0047244105051150
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unsurpassed masterpieces: works that changed our understanding of
past events. There have been many very good films dealing with
World War II, but the status of these three films remains unchanged;
they are still considered works of superior reach. Nuit et brouillard
and Shoah both focus on the concentration camps of World War II,
while Le Chagrin et la pitié investigates life in the city of ClermontFerrand under the German occupation. My intention is not to
examine these films as documentary evidence of discrete aspects of
the war, but to study them in their specificity as testimonial evidence
of France’s conflicted relationship to the events of the war, and in
their intertextuality as factual indication of cultural changes in our
approach to history. In other words my purpose is to view these films
as documentary confirmation of the workings of cultural memory.
Each of these films marks a specific moment in France’s difficult path
to assessing the events of the ‘dark years’. Compared with one
another, they chart subtle changes in the political, social and cultural
attitudes towards the war years. But in addition to the facts
investigated, these films also present us with exceptional illustrations
of the vicissitudes of recollections, the unpredictable workings of
memory, and the vicarious effects of visual and oral testimonies.
Alain Resnais’ film takes its title from the 7 December 1941 decree of
the Fuehrer called the Nacht-und-Nebel Erlass whereby, within the
territories occupied by the Germans, people considered hostile to the
Third Reich, most particularly communists, but others as well, could
be arrested, deported and ultimately killed (Night-and-Fog Decree, 1).
Commissioned by the Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre
Mondiale, Nuit et brouillard is a short, thirty-two minute documentary
on the concentration camps ten years after their liberation. The film
starts in colour on the grounds of a concentration camp as it appears
at the moment of the filming. The present is shown in colour, but in
the course of the film the past is evoked through clips of black-andwhite newsreels, photographs and selections from films taken by the
liberators. These newsreels, photographs and other visual documents
were found in the war archives of France, Poland and the Netherlands.
Resnais thus includes in Nuit et brouillard clips of films taken by the
British, the Americans and the Russians at the liberation respectively
of Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Until Resnais’ film,
these visual documents had not been released publicly. The first
viewing of Nuit et brouillard was then for almost all spectators an
initial confrontation with the visual proof of the enormity of the
horrors of the deportations and the genocide. Nuit et brouillard starts
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in the present, in colour, the camera slowly moving across a bucolic
landscape under a blue sky filled with fluffy clouds to the
accompaniment of a musical score; then fences of barbed wire appear
in front of the landscape. The narrator comments that this is a
‘peaceful landscape . . . an ordinary road . . . an ordinary village’. The
names of Struthof, Oranienburg, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Belsen,
Ravensbruck and Dachau, the narrator reminds us, were ‘names like
any others on maps and in guidebooks’. The filming of the barbed
wires is interrupted to show black-and-white clips of Nazi soldiers
marching, Hitler making a speech, etc., to evoke 1933 when, as the
narrator tells us, ‘the machine gets underway’. Then the camera
shows us wooden watchtowers with different roofs: sloping roofs,
slanted roofs, flat roofs while the voice says: ‘Any style will do. It’s
left to the imagination: Swiss style, garage style, Japanese style, no
style at all.’ As the camera slowly films the buildings at the entrance
to a camp, the voice-off of the narrator tells us that ‘Meanwhile,
Burger, a German Communist; Stern a Jewish student from Amsterdam;
Schmulszki, a merchant in Cracow; Annette, a schoolgirl in Bordeaux.
All go on living their everyday lives, not knowing that there is a
place, a thousand miles away, already awaiting them.’
The screenplay written by Jean Cayrol, himself a former inmate at
Mauthausen, explains, and also comments on, the visual narrative of
the film by orally projecting the not-yet-accomplished future of these
individuals into the past evoked by the film. Resnais now brings
forth footage of newsreel showing gatherings of men, women and
children, streets packed with people bearing the Star of David on
their coats being herded by soldiers. Later in the film we will see the
horrific and unforgettable images of the packed trains, the dead on
arrival, the filled barracks, the mountains of hair and glasses, the
skeletal bodies of men standing naked, the calcinated bodies of those
who were burned, heaps of bodies pushed into a mass grave by a
bulldozer. The visual documentation is overwhelming. We are shown
rolls of cloth made of human hair, soap made of human remains,
lampshades made of human skin. In a short half-hour, Resnais’ Nuit
et brouillard deploys for all to see the unimaginable record of human
atrocities perpetrated on millions of unarmed civilians shipped like
cattle from all over Europe to fuel the hubris of Nazi ideology.
According to the video jacket, when it was released François Truffaut
called it the greatest film ever made.
Ostensibly a documentary about concentration camps, Resnais’
film is also a skilfully composed, precisely structured, carefully
organized work of art that conveys, in addition to the evidentiary
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materials it presents, its own ideological message summarized by the
narrator at the end of the film:
The crematorium is no longer in use. The devices of the Nazis are out
of date. Nine million dead haunt this landscape. Who is on the lookout
from this strange tower to warn us of the coming of new executioners?
Are their faces really different from our own? Somewhere among us,
there are lucky Kapos, reinstated officers and unknown informers.
There are those who refused to believe this, or believed it only from
time to time. And there are those of us who sincerely look upon the
ruins today as if the old concentration camp monster were dead and
buried beneath them. Those who pretend to take hope again as the
image fades, as though there were a cure for the plague of these camps.
Those of us who pretend to believe that all this happened only once, at
a certain time and in a certain place, and those who refuse to see, who
do not hear the cry to the end of time. (Night and Fog, 17)
Through the sound track, concentration camps are not simply
presented as a fact of history, relegated to the past; Resnais’ film
underscores the present relevance, and future probability, of events
yet-to-come that will once more exemplify the inhumanity of
mankind to its own kind. The collapse of the past into the present for
future recollection already presented in the visual narrative, through
the montage of coloured and black-and-white film sequences, is
underscored as well by the verbal narrative that accompanies their
deployment.
Although Nuit et brouillard won the Prix Vigo for best documentary, it
was withdrawn from the Cannes Festival of 1956, presumably at the
request of the German government. The French authorities, however,
also interfered. While the French censors glossed over the inferences
of the narrative, they focused on a shot of about five seconds that
showed a control tower at the camp of Pithiviers manned by a French
gendarme. After lengthy negotiations, the producers agreed to alter
the image by covering the gendarme’s uniform (Monaco, 1978: 22).
Today, we know that many camps set throughout France
(Compiègne, Drancy, Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande, Gurs and several
others) were gathering places and transit points for deportees who
would be shipped to concentration camps. These French camps were
neither guarded nor run by Germans, but were entirely under French
control. Resnais’ film clearly mentions several of the major French
concentration camps: Compiègne, Drancy, Pithiviers. But as the
erasure of the gendarme’s uniform suggests, and the censors of the
time clearly understood, Resnais’ film presented a potential danger to
French authorities and a French public still unwilling, or unable, to
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recognize its own complicity in the Nazi death machine. Twelve years
after Nuit et brouillard, the question of France’s complicity with the
Nazi occupier would be taken up by Marcel Ophuls in Le Chagrin et la
pitié.
Other aspects of Nuit et brouillard appear today symptomatic of the
1950s. In 1954, as Resnais was starting to work on his film, the French
government instituted a day of remembrance of the deportations. No
distinction was then made between political deportees and racial
deportees, and in Resnais’ film the concentration camps are presented
as undifferentiated in their structures, functions and populations.
And yet, although all deportees were subjected to indescribable
atrocities, unimaginable pain and suffering, the differences between
concentration camps and death camps, between the treatment of
political deportees and racial deportees, followed markedly divergent
patterns. During the war, 63,085 French (non-Jewish) men and
women were deported, among whom one finds resisters, hostages,
political prisoners, common criminals, and bystanders who may have
been accidentally taken in a sweep. Of those 37,025, or 59 per cent,
returned to France after the war. These French deportees, many of
whom awaited deportation at Compiègne, survived the so-called
regular concentration camps such as Ravensbrück and Buchenwald.
But the history of Jews who were deported from France is quantitatively and qualitatively very different. With few exceptions, Jews
parked at the Vel’d’Hiv, at Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande
were not taken to concentration camps, but shipped directly to
Auschwitz-Birkenau, a combination labour camp and death camp. Of
the 75,721 Jews from France who were deported only 2500 survived:
that is to say 3 per cent (Wieviorka, 1992: 21). At the start of the war,
France counted over 40 million people and a Jewish population of
about 300,000. In short, a quarter of the Jewish population of France
disappeared in Auschwitz. In Nuit et brouillard, the word ‘Jewish’ is
said only once towards the beginning of Resnais’ film; when future
deportees are evoked, we hear the narrator count ‘Stern, a Jewish
student from Amsterdam’ among those who will be deported in the
future. Jewishness is visually indicated in two black-and-white
sections when we see men, women and children wearing yellow stars
on their coats being gathered. Resnais’ film fuses two radically
different historical events into one: deportation on the one hand, and,
on the other, the Jewish genocide. For whatever the style of the
watchtowers, all camps in the film seem to have had the same
function and all deportees are presumed to have had similar
experiences. Thirty years after Nuit et brouillard, the French public
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would face the Jewish genocide in Lanzmann’s Shoah. The deportation
and the Jewish genocide are two very different historical events, each
characterized by a particular catalogue of horrors that left incurable
traces of pain in each of its victims. Not only were labour camps and
death camps distinctive places of horror, but each camp within each
category had its own specific characteristics; thus, beyond individual
psychological and physical reaction, each deportee’s experience was
itself also unique. Of course, it would be impossible to evoke these
places of horror in their specificity and in their totality, or take into
account the particular experience of each individual. In the words of
historian Annette Wieviorka, ‘Aucun endroit ne peut constituer un
lieu de mémoire satisfaisant de la déportation’ (1992: 434).
Nuit et brouillard revealed to its French audiences that not all of
those who were away from France between 1940 and 1945 had
experienced the war in similar ways. For in addition to the men who
had spent the war in Germany, either as prisoners or forced
labourers, there were also the men and women who had been sent to
concentration camps. The film’s unquestionable achievement is to
have revealed for the first time to a large public the existence of
concentration camps. However, in its visual narrative, by fusing
Buchenwald with Auschwitz-Birkenau, in blending the French
deportees with those marked for Jewish genocide, Resnais’ film
appears today as a documentary of the mid-1950s. As a visual
narrative, the film reflects the vision of a France united in its fate
during the German occupation – a France imagined as a cohesive
society, the mythic France created by Charles de Gaulle and
emblematic of the 1950s. Working against the visual narrative, the
verbal narrative tells another story. From its very title, which recalls
the name of the Nazi decree that singled out communists as enemies
of the Third Reich, to the concluding remarks written by Jean Cayrol:
‘Somewhere among us, there are lucky Kapos, reinstated officers, and
unknown informers’. Cayrol’s narrative reminds its audience that the
war had two fronts: one directed at the Nazis, the foreign enemy, and
another internal front – that of a France divided by political
allegiances and ideologies. This internal ideological divide did not
just characterize the Vichy government on the one side and the
resisters on the other. The Resistance itself was split between political
parties and ideologies. Communists and socialists made up the core
of the Resistance in occupied France, and they were mostly the ones
who were deported. Those who joined de Gaulle in London were not
only fewer in number, they mostly embraced the political stance of
the parties of the centre and the centre right. Those on the left
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struggled in clandestinity; those on the right were part of a military
action. When de Gaulle came to power at the end of the war, both
socialists and communists were pushed aside. In a famous speech
given on 25 August 1944 to hail the liberation of Paris, de Gaulle
assimilated the ‘French people’, independently of their political
ideologies, in the struggle against the Nazis, thus launching the myth
of a united national French Resistance:
Paris! Paris outragé! Paris brisé! Paris martyrisé! mais Paris libéré!
libéré par lui-même, libéré par son peuple avec le concours des armées
de la France, avec l’appui et le concours de la France tout entière, de la
France qui se bat, de la seule France, de la vraie France, de la France
éternelle. (Rousso, 1990: 30)
Fourteen years after Nuit et brouillard, Le Chagrin et la pitié by Marcel
Ophuls would debunk the Gaullist myth of a unified France heroically
combating the German occupation, showing us instead a fractured
society, divided along class lines, separated by political ideologies, split
by religious identities. As Henry Rousso has argued, and as Ophuls’
film makes visible, the internal conflicts apparent during the war years
inscribe the Vichy government in a long series of ‘Franco-French’ wars
whose other major markers were the Revolution, the Commune and
the Dreyfus Affair (1990: 14).
Commissioned by German and Swiss television, Le Chagrin et la
pitié was first televised in 1969 in Germany, Switzerland, Holland and
the United States. In France the government-controlled ORTF would
oppose its screening on television until 1981. But starting in April
1971, and for the next ten years, thousands of moviegoers, as
opposed to millions of television watchers, would be able to view the
film in Paris. The film’s impact on its French audience, the responses
it elicited, and the debates it launched have been well documented by
Henry Rousso and Stanley Hoffmann. ‘Some critics of the film’,
Hoffmann reminds us, ‘did not so much mind its having shaken the
Gaullist tree, but they thought that it gave a distorted view of France
during those years – a myth was in danger of being replaced by a
counter-myth’. ‘Maybe’, he continues, ‘the very strength and resilience
of the myth had invited as mighty and devastating a rebuttal as this
one, but two excesses do not make one truth’ (in Ophuls, 1972: xvi).
Over four hours long, Le Chagrin et la pitié is an investigative
documentary whose purpose is to present ‘la chronique d’une ville
française sous l’occupation’, as its subtitle explains. Constructed in
two parts, called ‘L’Effondrement’ and ‘Le Choix’, Le Chagrin et la pitié
presents, through a series of interviews, people – some well-known,
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others not – who spent the war years in Clermont-Ferrand, a city of
some 134,000 inhabitants, the capital of the Auvergne, situated 59
kilometres from Vichy. The film is not a historical reconstruction of
the past; rather it is an attempt to investigate the memory of past
events as experienced by a vast array of individuals including
resisters, fascists and German soldiers who spend the war there. In
addition to them, Ophuls also interviews the pharmacist Marcel
Verdier, who simply continued to live and work ‘normally’ – so to
speak – throughout the war. In the early part of the film, Verdier tells
us that then: ‘les deux sentiments qui me furent les plus précieux
furent le chagrin et la pitié’. This statement would become the
ambiguous title of the film (Ophuls, 1980: 29), an ambiguous title
because, unlike the pharmacist who was an uninvolved bystander,
Ophuls is, on the contrary, someone who shows his partiality for
those who did get involved and were engagés, most particularly those
on the side of the Resistance. Like Resnais before him, Ophuls uses
clips of newsreels, newspapers, photographs and documents to
explain or illustrate specific questions, and he uses skilful montage to
call attention to contradictions. The most memorable moment of such
a contradiction comes at the start of the second half, when the wellknown champion cyclist, Raphael Geminiani, declares that ClermontFerrand was not occupied and that there were no Germans there to
be seen, while a few seconds later Marcel Verdier says that there were
Germans everywhere. Before and after these two scenes Ophuls had
shown us interviews with German military personnel stationed in
Clermont-Ferrand. Unlike Resnais, who presented visual evidence of
the camps but did not interview deportees, Ophuls makes those who
experienced the events the centre of his investigation. Setting up
contradictory accounts, flashing documentation on the screen that
supports or conflicts with what is being said, Ophuls shows us the
emotional dimension involved in recalling the past. Between a
specific historical fact and the memory of that fact the spectator
observes the enactment of personal recollection, the process of
retrieval of voluntary memory, accompanied by denial or selective
forgetfulness on the part of the witnesses.
Like Nuit et brouillard, Le Chagrin et la pitié highlights the past as a
lesson for future use, according to the adage that those who do not
know history are bound to repeat it. It is no accident that the first
scene takes place in Germany at the wedding of the daughter of
Helmuth Tausend, the former captain of the Wehrmacht stationed
in Clermont-Ferrand, and that the second scene takes place in
Clermont-Ferrand in the sitting room of Marcel Verdier, shown
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surrounded by his grown-up children. The future generations are
placed as the intradiegetic narratees, the receivers of the discourses of
the fathers. Like Nuit et brouillard, Le Chagrin et la pitié talks about the
past, but addresses itself to future generations, and like Nuit et
brouillard, Le Chagrin et la pitié testifies first and foremost to its own
present. Rousso summarizes it this way:
l’originalité de la forme, le rôle prépondérant des témoignages, leur
démenti immédiat rapprochent Le Chagrin et la pitié du récit de famille,
qui parle au quotidien, et accepte la contradiction. D’où les rapports
passionnels que les Français ont entretenu avec l’oeuvre. En ce sens, Le
Chagrin est sans doute le premier film sur la mémoire de l’Occupation,
plus que sur son histoire. Les auteurs ont braqué leurs projecteurs non
sur les années quarante, mais bien sur la fin des années soixante, après
une décennie de régime gaulliste. (Rousso, 1990: 134)
In Le Chagrin et la pitié, Ophuls juxtaposes two narratives: historical
fact and the remembered experience of such facts. Between events
and the memory of those events, the audience witnesses inconsistencies,
even contradictions, that disturb the accepted meaning of ‘history’
understood as an analytical, descriptive, scholarly scientific project.
A decade after Le Chagrin et la pitié, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah would
set another milestone for French documentaries of World War II.
Geoffrey Hartman singles it out as the film that ‘blanches all other
Holocaust depictions’. ‘It is’, he tells us, ‘an epic intervention that
creates a rupture on the plane of consciousness like that of Auschwitz
on the plane of history’ (1992: 332). Shoshana Felman, who like many
others shares Hartman’s opinion, elaborates her reaction in these terms:
Shoah revives the Holocaust with such a power (a power that no
previous film on the subject could attain) that it radically displaces and
shakes up not only any common notion we might have entertained
about it, but our very vision of reality as such, our very sense of what
the world, culture, history and our life within it are all about. (Felman,
1992: 205)
A nine-and-a-half-hour-long film, Lanzmann’s Shoah presents itself as
An Oral History of the Holocaust. Like Nuit et brouillard and Le Chagrin
et la pitié, Shoah is a deftly crafted art film as well as a documentary.
From the church that appears in the upper left-hand corner of the
opening shot, to the camera zooming on a Sauer truck as the gassing
of people in trucks at Chelmno is being described, Shoah reveals in its
details that it is a precisely constructed film whose aim is to inform,
demonstrate, recall and engage. Unlike Nuit et brouillard and Le
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Chagrin et la pitié, however, the few archival materials present in
Shoah make it a film almost entirely built upon the recollections of the
victims, the statements of their torturers, and the remembrances of
bystanders. The influence of Nuit et brouillard is apparent in the
repetitive travelling shots of the train tracks leading to the entrance of
Auschwitz. Moreover, Lanzmann’s investigative interview method
reminds us of Le Chagrin et la pitié. Yet, in contrast to Ophuls’ approach,
in Shoah the reconstruction of the past is done purely through the
verbal narratives of those being interviewed. While the soundtrack
tells of unimaginable events, the camera films the present: the faces of
those who speak, the landscape that surrounds them (a clearing in a
forest, pleasure boats on a lake), or the place where they are filmed (a
living room, a barber shop). In Shoah, the visual depicts the present
while the voice evokes the past.
Nuit et brouillard had brought to our consciousness the physical
horrors of the camps: the skeletal bodies, the bulldozer pushing bodies
into a mass grave, the mountains of hair; in contrast, the absence of such
visual evidence opens in Shoah another heuristic path for
understanding. Perhaps, as Leon Wieseltier suggests, ‘rather than
exposing us, the famous photographs have protected us, by virtue of
their being photographs, that is frozen, fixed, false to the flow of time in
which the sufferings were lived’ (1986: 27). Jorge Semprun, a former
deportee of Buchenwald, makes a similar point when he argues that:
les images, en effet, tout en montrant l’horreur nue, la déchéance
physique, le travail de la mort, étaient muettes. Pas seulement, parce
que tournées, selon les moyens de l’époque, sans prise de son directe.
Muettes surtout parce qu’elles ne disaient rien de précis sur la réalité
montrée, parce qu’elles n’en laissent entendre que des bribes, des
messages confus. Il aurait fallu travailler le film au corps, dans sa
matière filmique même, en arrêter parfois le défilement: fixer l’image
pour en agrandir certains détails; reprendre la projection au ralenti,
dans certains cas, en accélérer le rythme, à d’autres moments. Il aurait
surtout fallu commenter les images, pour les déchiffrer, les inscrire non
seulement dans un contexte historique mais dans une continuité de
sentiments et d’émotions. Et ce commentaire, pour s’approcher le plus
près possible de la vérité vécue, aurait dû être prononcé par les
survivants eux-mêmes: les revenants de cette longue absence, les
Lazares de cette longue mort. Il aurait fallu, en somme, traiter la réalité
documentaire comme une matière de fiction. (Semprun, 1994: 211)
Perhaps it is the combined forces of the absence of the pictures so
present in the spectators’ memory with the then-yet-unheard oral
narratives that make watching Shoah such a moving experience. But
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perhaps, more fundamentally, it is being face to face with those who
speak to the camera that makes us understand, as Emmanuel Lévinas
has shown us, our relation and our distance from the Other, and
hence our answerability to and responsibility for the Other. For the
language spoken by that Other facing us speaks and reaches, beyond
the limits of rationality, or the imaginable, to our humanity and our
compassion (1987: 203–36).
In Shoah past and present inscribe themselves on the screen in the
same frame in a dual and divergent movement. As the soundtrack
tells a story that the images on the screen seem to belie, the
disjunction between past and present, the disconnections between the
ostensive and the aural short-circuit the spectator’s own sense of time
and space. Hence the repeated assertion that viewing Shoah is not
simply watching a film, but undergoing an unexpected experience. In
her moving preface to the published text of the film, Simone de
Beauvoir tells us:
Shoah is not an easy film to talk about. There is magic in this film that
defies explanation. After the war we read masses of accounts of the
ghettos and the extermination camps, and we were devastated. But
when, today, we see Claude Lanzmann’s extraordinary film, we realize,
we have understood nothing. In spite of everything we knew, the
ghastly experience remained remote from us. Now, for the first time,
we live it in our minds, hearts and flesh. It becomes our experience.
(Beauvoir, 1985: vii)
Robert Brinkley and Steven Youra, in their co-authored article ‘Tracing
Shoah’, underscore the effects of the film on its viewing audience:
In tracing what can be traced and in filming what can be witnessed,
Shoah can turn spectators into producers in the work of bearing witness
. . . the film’s pacing and internal recurrences also produce a viewer’s
memories . . . Through the nine and a half hours, we work with these
materials for ourselves. In this collaborative project, Shoah’s cadence
gives us time. (Brinkley and Youra, 1996: 125)
Leon Wieseltier summarized it best: ‘Shoah’, he tells us, ‘has the
duration not of spectacle, but of experience’ (1986: 29). In presenting
personal testimonies of those who lived the events, the film forces the
spectator to hear, to listen and to receive the narrative of an experience
that even at a great temporal and spatial distance has a disquieting
effect.
Among its many accomplishments Shoah will be remembered
for calling attention to the particularity of the Jewish genocide and
for launching the creation of video archives of testimonies of
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eyewitnesses to stand as evidentiary materials for the future. Like
Nuit et brouillard and Le Chagrin et la pitié, Shoah speaks against
forgetting the past, against erasing from our collective memory the
unimaginable atrocities committed in the camps. On this issue,
Lanzmann has been adamant:
Le pire crime, en même temps moral et artistique, qui puisse être
commis lorsqu’il s’agit de réaliser une oeuvre consacrée à l’Holocauste
est de considérer celui-ci comme passé. L’Holocauste est soit légende,
soit présent, il n’est en aucun cas de l’ordre du souvenir. Un film
consacré à l’Holocauste ne peut être qu’un contre-mythe, c’est-à-dire
une enquête sur le présent de l’Holocauste, ou à tout le moins sur un
passé dont les cicatrices sont encore si fraîchement et si vivement
inscrites dans les lieux et dans les consciences qu’il se donne à voir
dans un hallucinante intemporalité. (Lanzmann, 1990: 316)
Unquestionably Shoah succeeds in making the Holocaust an everpresent, unforgettable event of our times. In addition to bringing the
Holocaust to public consciousness like Nuit et brouillard and Le
Chagrin et la pitié, Shoah also reveals something about France in the
early 1980s. Whereas those interviewed in the film speak in different
languages, and from different locations, there are no interviews
conducted in France, nor are any of the 2500 Jews from France who
returned from Auschwitz called upon to testify. With the exception of
the people of Corfu who answer Lanzmann’s questions in French, in
Shoah French appears chiefly as the language of inquest, the purveyor
of the questioning. The absence of any ‘French’ testimonial – either in
French or from France – sets France apart as an unmarked country in
the European theatre of war, a place seemingly without direct
association to the events. In the absence of any French interlocutors,
in its French unanswerability, Lanzmann’s 1985 film testifies to the
not-yet-acknowledged, the not-yet-recognized historical fate of 75,000
Jews from France sent to Auschwitz. In an extraordinary twist of
irony, while in the United States the word ‘Holocaust’ is the
established signifier of the Jewish genocide, in France, since
Lanzmann’s film, the word ‘Shoah’ – a biblical Hebrew word meaning
destruction and annihilation – is the term used to refer to the
implementation of what the Nazis called ‘the final solution’.
Inscribed in the French language, la Shoah, like a ghost of the past,
stands as the return of the repressed, a word whose utterance so
uncannily evokes, as Michel Deguy points out, the hushing sounds
one makes in French to demand silence:
Le vocable même de ‘Shoah’ est devenu ce nom, opaque et mystérieux,
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entré dans nos propos, nos murmures, nos meditations, nos allusions,
comme un hôte sombre qu’on n’oubliera plus dans la maison, dont on
murmure le prénom retrouvé, vocable si proche en français de celui
qu’on prononce pour étouffer le bruit. (Deguy, 1990: 21)
Beyond the testimonies that Lanzmann’s film brings to the archives
of history, its other extraordinary achievement was to have left in the
French lexicon the imprint of a Hebrew word – the linguistic trace
symptomatic of a historical trauma – which marks, at one and the
same time, the departure and the return of Jews to France’s cultural
memory (Furman, 1995: 311).
Set side by side, along a signifying chain, Nuit et brouillard, Le Chagrin
et la pitié and Shoah reveal yet another story: how to conceive of
‘history’, the relationship between past, present and future, and the
relative importance of traditional historical materials (documents,
photographs, newsreels) and personal testimonies to the narration of
historical events. When Resnais, Ophuls and Lanzmann create their
respective documentaries, they make it clear that they look at the past
from the viewpoint of the present, the present here being the moment
when the film is made. By situating the narration in the present, these
filmmakers reveal their conscious desire to redress errors and point
out lacunae in the officially acknowledged history of World War II,
and to make a testimonial for the enlightenment of future generations;
each film, however, perhaps unknown to its maker, also speaks of its
own present that made investigating the past event necessary and
possible. Resnais’ documentary revealed the concentration camps, the
existence of deportees, the internal French political fights during the
war and afterwards. It could be seen as a critique of the Gaullist
regime that followed the war. The opposition to Gaullism is
continued in Ophuls’ work as it demystifies the heroic past of a
France defined by its ‘Resistance’. In the early 1970s, Ophuls’ film
also echoes with the social rifts that the Algerian war was creating in
France. Lanzmann’s film brought back to the forefront an aspect of
the war then mostly occluded, namely the genocide of the European
Jews, an issue made even more acute by Israel’s wars and tenuous
survival during the 1970s when Lanzmann was working on his film.
Lanzmann’s film also answers revisionists and Holocaust deniers of
the 1970s and 1980s. In their screenplays, the three filmmakers
approach the events of World War II from a teleological viewpoint.
Resnais’ epilogue addresses the future; Ophuls’ screenplay portrays
younger generations listening to their elders. The testimonies of
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Lanzmann’s film will, for some time to come, interpellate successive
generations of the viewing public. All three filmmakers espouse a
view of history where the past holds the hope of helping to forge the
future; historical events are thus seen as partaking in a developmental model suggesting scenarios of causes and effects, relating
through the present, past to future. It is perhaps this eschatological
perspective from a future yet to come that gives these films the aura
of a revelation and a somewhat messianic tone.
Nuit et brouillard, Le Chagrin et la pitié and Shoah are three superbly
constructed, finely crafted films created with the steadfast resolve to
stand against forgetfulness, and keep the memory of the atrocities of the
war present in our consciousness. Memory is not only the thematic
focus of these films, it is embodied in their composition and structure.
The recurring images, the interrupted narratives, the unexpected
appearance and disappearance of witnesses, the unfinished stories,
imitate the very dynamics of the process of recalling, of the work of
memory.
Resnais, Ophuls and Lanzmann consulted experts, historians and
stacks of documents to prepare their films. But these films are not,
strictly speaking, historical documentaries; they are works of art
dealing with historical events. Resnais underscores past and present
in his use of black-and-white versus colour film; Ophuls creates the
effect of simultaneity in his montage of documentary evidence in
counterpoint to the narratives of his witnesses; against the now
anodyne, now unscarred backgrounds, the horrors evoked by
Lanzmann’s witnesses are made even more salient. For the viewing
public in the darkness of the movie theatre, other aspects of the
protean forms of the present come into play. Through empathetic
identification, some viewers may imagine that they are vicariously
experiencing the events described, but beyond these extreme cases,
the spectators experience the viewing of these films in their
individual ‘present’, and the punctual present of that viewing
moment affects the specific reception of each film for each spectator.
The viewing of these films thus creates a cultural community of
spectators.
The impact of these films on France’s cultural consciousness can
still be felt today. As markers of change, they themselves have
become historical documents, works that testify to France’s
difficulties in processing its past. But beyond the ‘historical’ data
regarding the revelations of France’s troubled ‘dark years’, these
films also attest to another important phenomenon: the cultural
displacement in the public sphere of traditional history in favour of
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the emergence of testimony. Witnesses testify first and foremost to
having been there, to having been deeply affected by the events. With
Le Chagrin et la pitié, and particularly with Shoah, we witness the
making of a new phenomenon: the launching of archives filled with
the testimonies of those who experienced events. These testimonies
are the building blocks of a new form of records: not those of the
state, or specific institutions involved in the events, but the annals of
the participants, mainly the victims, leaving for other generations the
narratives of their pain and the visual and aural traces of their
memories. This trend has been noted by many historians, more
particularly by Pierre Nora in his monumental work on Les Lieux de
mémoire:
L’histoire, au sens où on l’entend spontanément, et qui exprimait
essentiellement la nation, comme la nation s’exprimait essentiellement
à travers elle, était devenue, par l’école et avec le temps, le cadre et le
moule de notre mémoire collective . . . C’est en ce sens qu’histoire et
mémoire ne faisaient qu’un; l’histoire était une mémoire vérifiée.
(Nora, 1992: 4703–4)
In contrast to this form of traditional history as conveyed over time
by the educational system to forge a national cultural identity and
legacy, those excluded or marginalized by a larger collective history
rely on personal narratives and ritual memorialization to buttress
their sense of community and identity. For Nora, the turn to memorialization testifies to a major cultural shift due to the collapse of an
understandable link between past and future. How could German
Enlightenment and idealism lead to the Third Reich and Auschwitz?
How could France’s republican ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité
account for the collaborationist Vichy government? If the past can no
longer explain the present and bear responsibility for the future, or if
the future cannot be imagined in terms of the past, then only the
present can be accounted for and examined. In Nora’s view,
traditional national history is being displaced by social consciousness,
that is to say contemporary solidarity; hence the significance of the
testimony of memory for those living in the present.
La nation de Renan est morte et ne reviendra pas. Elle ne reviendra pas
parce que la dissolution du mythe national, qui liait étroitement
l’avenir au passé, a eu pour effet quasi mécanique l’autonomisation des
deux instances: celle de l’avenir, rendu tout entier à son imprévisibilité,
et devenu du même coup obsédant; celle du passé, détaché de la
cohérence organisatrice d’une histoire, et, du même coup, devenu tout
entier patrimonial. Elle ne reviendra pas parce que la relève du
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mythique par le mémoriel suppose une mutation profonde: le passage
d’une conscience historique de la nation à une conscience sociale, donc
d’une histoire active à une histoire acquise. Le passé n’est plus la
garantie de l’avenir: là est la raison principale de la promotion de la
mémoire comme agent dynamique et seule promesse de continuité.
A la solidarité du passé et de l’avenir, s’est substituée la solidarité
du présent et de la mémoire. (Nora, 1992: 1009)
In contrasting past and present, in focusing on the view from the
present, Nuit et brouillard, Le Chagrin et la pitié and Shoah have not
relegated the war years to scholarly perennity and public
forgetfulness, they have made the war a relevant experience for new
generations. By playing the ‘present’ of witnessing against the
historicized narratives of the past, these films explode our structured,
catalogued, inventoried understanding of past events to unleash new
complexities and oppositions, and in so doing interpellate, include,
and reshape the spectators’ appreciation of these events. The force of
these films is precisely that they have themselves become sites of
cultural memory, and, as such, they are the conveyors of the yearning
for recognition and valorization of the experiences of distinctive
communities. With each generation of the viewing public, these films
create their own memorial and cultural legacies.
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Nelly Furman was Professor of French at Cornell University and is
now Director of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages
for the Modern Language Association. Address: Modern Language
Association, 26 Broadway, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10004-1789,
USA [email: [email protected] and [email protected]]
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