Censorship in the 1950's: How did this affect the making of “Night and Fog” one of the first ever cinematic documentaries on the Holocaust? A film by Alain Resnais.
The ‘Night and Fog Decree’ was issued by Adolf Hitler on December 7th 1941. The ‘Night and Fog Decree’ (Nacht und Nebel Erlass) bypassed all forms of basic law and was an order from Hitler to his secret police to murder anyone in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe who was deemed to be a threat. The decree stated that such people were not to be immediately executed but were to vanish without a trace into the night and fog. (www.historylearningsite.co.uk).
I would like to point out the poignant cinematography, which was very innovative for its time. The narration and the filming introducing what was about to be uncovered must have been extremely moving in a melancholy way. The mise-en-scène is both compelling and haunting, each frame cleverly editied. Resnais experimented with what is known as the long shot, and the 360 degree shot, to make the voyeur very aware of the unbalanced composition. The panning of the film tracking back from Auschwitz brings us a close up, of barbed wire. This clearly suggests that this isn't what it appears to be. Resnais films the past in black and white, and the then present in colour. The ambiance is chilling, and the composed background music unique. Where normally dramatic loud music would be used to express the abonimation and enormity of the most horrendous scenes, Resnais did quite the contrary.
My main argument will cover what was behind Night and Fog. This controversial piece of art is entwined with post-war French politics and censorship - for example how France, post-war, wanted to be perceived in an official capacity durin...
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...wie. Michelangelo Antonioni; Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais. The Tantivy Press
Greene, Naomi(1999) Landscapes of loss: The national Past of Postwar French cinema (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press)
Krantz, Charles (1985) ‘Teaching Night and Fog: History and Historiography’ Film and history, 15:1, pp 2-15
Raskin, Richard (1987) Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais (Aarhus:Aarhus University Press) (This contains a full, reconstructed shooting script and many critical sources)
Robert Michael, (1984) "A Second Look: Night and Fog" in Cineaste 13, 4 (1984), 36-37, reprinted in Raskin, 159-160. This book contains a number of contemporary reviews of Night and Fog, as well as interviews with Resnais, and more recent analyses of the film. The material is printed without commentary by the editor
Wilson, Emma (2006) French Film Directors, Alain Resnais
Filmography
Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Milton, Sybil. "The Camera as Weapon: Documentary Photography and the Holocaust." Multimedia Learning Center  Museum of Tolerance. The Simon Wiesenthal Center. 1999<http:// motlc.wiesenthal.com/resources/books/ annual1/chap03.html>.
Wiesel, Elie. "Night." World Views Classic and Contemporary Readings. Sixth ed. Boston: Pearson, 2010. 682-85
The Holocaust was one of the most devastating events to happen to us a world. On an ordinary day 1,000 people would be plucked from their everyday lives in ghettos. Over 30,000 Jewish people were arrested on Kristallnacht and taken to concentration camps. According to one source, “Over eleven million people were killed and about six million of them happened to be Jews” (“11 Facts”). Producing movies based around the Holocaust is a very controversial topic. There is the ever prominent argument on wheatear or not Holocaust based films can help us understand the different aspects of its reality.
Kagan, Norman. The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972. Print.
White, Kenneth. “Forget Your Desire: The Cinema of Guy Maddin.” Millenium Film Journal 45/46 (2006): 133-139.
NAREMORE, J. (1998). More than night film noir in its contexts. Berkeley, University of California Press. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=42280.
Last semester my documentary production professor told my classmates and I to avoid making films that were too much like Holocaust or civil rights films. This really struck me as an almost cold statement, however this semester in both this class and the film and Holocaust class that I took I began to understand what he meant. After reading much of Aaron Kerner’s book I saw even more, it wasn’t a statement on the subject matter but the filmic techniques that have been overused in the genres. The most burnt out are the tropes within each film; like the crafty jew trope, the jew as a victim, or as a hero, and the usage of naziploitation. These are all found in films revolving around the Holocaust and the film Europa Europa (Agnieska Holland, 1990)
Without a doubt, one of the darkest episodes in the history of mankind involved the systematic extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and gays by Nazi Germany. In order to get a good sense of the horror and despair that was felt by the interned, one simply needs to read the memoirs of Elie Wiesel in his “Night”, as translated from French by Stella Rodway and copyrighted by Bantam Books in 1960.
Fyne, Robert. The Hollywood propaganda of World War II. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994. Print.
Alain Renais’ documentary, Night and Fog, demonstrates the effect during and after, one of the darkest historical events- the Holocaust. The film, created ten years prior to the liberation of the camps, exposes the conditions in which the prisoners were forced to undertake. The film is a highly significant historical recollection. Renais is genius in utilizing the recurring mental contemplation of, “Who is responsible.” He never differentiates between who was responsible and who is the victim. One can easily refer to the prisoners of these camps as victims, but the wise absence of victimization, keeps the importance of knowledge of this time period, extremely relevant.
There was a point in time, when the Holocaust tragedy transpired where the Nazi’s committed genocide during World War II. In this day in age, the world looks back upon these ultimate crimes against humanity, where these atrocities occurred, believing this could never feasibly happen again in our time. Alain Resnais created the self-reflective documentary film, Night and Fog, to act as a warning to the audience that the tragic significance of the Holocaust was a reality that has and will always threaten humanity by its ability to return and become the present reality.
Brownlow, Kevin 1994, ‘Preface’, in Paolo, C, Burning Passions: an introduction to the study of silent film, British Film Institute, London: BFI, pp. 1-3.
It was not until the mid 1930s that the brutish dictator truly recognized the potential power of media, where in 1935 a special funding was given to the production of Italian films which was used to open up film institutions like the ‘Centro Sperimenale di Cinematografia’ (CSC) film school, and ‘Cinecitta’ (Cinema City) studios in 1937 (Ruberto and Wilson, 2007). The development of these institutions sparked the appearance of early sound cinema, specializing in genres such as comedies, melodramas, musicals and historical films, but were all categorized as ‘propaganda’ and ‘white telephone’ films by many critics due...
Hill, Rodney. "The New Wave Meets the Tradition of Quality: Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg." Cinema Journal 48.1 (2008): 27-50. Project MUSE. Web. 21 Jan. 2011. .