Place and the Holocaust:
Night and Fog

May 8, 2007

Some of the most interesting attempts to imagine place are found in works on the Holocaust. The formal challenge is obvious: the concentration camps are fairly nondescript places in which great—almost unimaginable—evil has been done. So how does one make this evil imaginable?

The documentary Night and Fog works with three main elements. An essay by Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol provides a narrative that holds the film together. Documentary footage (film and still photos) is mixed with later color footage of Auschwitz as it stood about ten years after the close of the war.. the scenes for the ghastly events of the Holocaust now appearing empty and overgrown.

This first image gives a sense of the challenge.. "capturing this reality" must always be the goal of the filmmaker. Given the resolutely normal appearance of the sites for the Holocaust.. how can these events ever really be imagined?

Having shown images of the camp's buildings, we are taken inside and shown the bunks on which victims of the Holocaust were crowded. Now they are clean and seem to to bear no traces of their past. The narrator again emphasizes that these empty bunks cannot be made real to the imagination either by word or image.

Panning away from the wooden bunks the camera reveals to us more of the interior structure. The point made by the narration is again the inability of this documentary medium to do anything but show the externals.. the "outer shell".. of the camps.

So far we have been presented with a mostly negative assessment of the ability of words and images to come to grips with a past event. Sure we can see the setting of these events, but the experience of history is always receding away from us.. out of reach. The goal of most artists is to make some kind of experience real to the viewer.. but that goal seems to be abjured here.

Despite this negative assessment, the documentary gives us a series of images that directly connect to the color scenes of the camp that we have just been shown. The pace of the narration picks up and the descriptions become quite tactile. It is as if someone decided suddenly: OK, let's try to communicate this experience in as vivid a manner as possible.

This is an image that effectively brings to life those clean empty bunks that still stand at Auschwitz. It may be true that "no description, no image can reveal their true dimension".. but this single image does have an impact. It makes that modern scene more imaginatively real.

This is the formal irony of Night and Fog. A documentary that expends a lot of energy letting the viewer know how far away the true experience lies, and how unimaginable a place might be, succeeds in making an experience and a place come alive in the imagination. That is a limited goal.. and it is not as if the viewer has actually "experienced" anything like what happened during the Holocaust.. but that is always true of art, right?

Those negative assessments of the ability of word and image to communicate an experience might be better viewed as a simple rhetorical device. Their job is to prime the viewer to want those modern images filled in with historical images and information.. and the film immediately complies.

One final point: doesn't the Holocaust present a rather clear case of an event that demands the full expenditure of creative ability? The grim tallies of deaths in the image below points to the need for an ethical use of human creativity. You can't say "never again" unless you can imagine what must be avoided.