What tone does the narrator use in this film, and what effect does it have on the overall tone of the film? Does it change at all through the course of the film?
How does the musical score affect the film?
Which of Nichols' modes would this film be categorized as? Why do you think this mode (or modes) was chosen?
In the Phillip Lopate article, the author says he hesitates to call "Night and Fog" a documentary, instead calling it a "nonfiction" film. The liner notes for the film itself actually call it an "antidocumentary". Why do you think this is? Do you agree?
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What is the effect of jumping back and forth between the color footage and historical black and white images?
What do you think was Resnais' ultimate motivation for making this film?
What tone does the narrator use in this film, and what effect does it have on the overall tone of the film? Does it change at all through the course of the film?
How does the musical score affect the film?
Which of Nichols' modes would this film be categorized as? Why do you think this mode (or modes) was chosen?
In the Phillip Lopate article, the author says he hesitates to call "Night and Fog" a documentary, instead calling it a "nonfiction" film. The liner notes for the film itself actually call it an "antidocumentary". Why do you think this is? Do you agree?
What is the effect of jumping back and forth between the color footage and historical black and white images?
What do you think was Resnais' ultimate motivation for making this film? Questions: NIGHT AND FOG
Nostalgia: we are fond spectators of a calm time, lulling, purged of that constant moment-to-moment anxiety for ones survival that edges each present moment with pain….It's as if the nostalgic film longs to attain the status of the snapshot, the perfect form…the past not as question but as posssession.
--Jay Cantor "Death and the Image"
"He makes the horrible ordinary so we may believe it; and then he makes the ordinary horrible so that we may fear it."
--how is this manifested in the film…what does Cantor mean?
--In 1956, France was embroiled in a growing colonial war in
Algeria…How is this reflected in the film?
--French complicity with Nazis in Vichy…from 1940 on Jews deported
--What is the intent of this documentary? What do the makers want us to question? Feel? Do? --Cantor: What I think the filmakers demand of us seems
almost inhuman: that the death instinct, and our anxiety, might
be felt by us and in us, in each of its manifestations, that the
viewer might play every role in the film: executioner, spectator,
victim, and the artist whose violence forms the image of this
kingdom of death. Resourceful animals, we need all exits
closed or we will avoid this confrontation."
--What is the filmmaker saying about making a film of this type?
What is the filmmakers role?
--Is the film more or less effective for not having used personal testimony? Why do you think Resnais chose not to use witnesses?
The viewer is forced to consider the inadequate evidence and make the connections, relive the "endless interrupted fear."
--Can the past be retrieved thru this documentary evidence? What part of the past? What elements of the past can we know?
"What remains of the reality of these camps--despised by those
who made them. incomprehensible to those who suffered here? …no description, no picture can restore their true dimension."
We would need the very matress,,,
--What do you make of the fact that Resnais never mentions Jews explicitly? Simply calls them "deportees"
--What does the filmmaker say about the types of documentary evidence he's using? Is it effective in doing the job? Can ANY evidence effectively serve the job?
***"No description, no shot can restore their true dimension,
endless interrupted fear."
The gulf between the experience reconstructed thru the
assemblage of evidence and the the historic experience.
--Were the social and psychological "meaning" and implications of this film different in 1955 than now?
--What's the significance of "the only sign--but you have to know--is the ceiling scored by fingernails." --the only slim evidentiary link between past and present --Much of the stock footage and photography was originally taken by the Nazis--a way of documenting and justifying their work. What does the use of this material in this film say about the nature of documentary evidence?
--Some of the footage used was taken by allied liberation forces--how do you think this footage was used? What was it's purpose? How is that purpose different from the uses in the film?
--Photographic evidence vs moving picture evidence: sequence of man in hospital bed.
-- investigates the cyclical nature of man’s violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.
--Night and Fog: a reference to the arrival of interned prisoners into concentration camps under the cloak of darkness, and the subconscious suppression of knowledge and culpability for the resulting horror of the committed atrocities. -- -- Using highly unsettling, archival footage recorded during postwar liberation contrasted against the stillness of the modern-day landscape,
Resnais creates a powerful, haunting chronicle of cruelty, dehumanization, and denial of personal responsibility.
--The text emphasises the timelessness and transferability of events and, in view of the struggle for liberation in Algeria at that time, is a warning against new executioners.