Night and fog (film)

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Movie
German title night and Fog
Original title Nuit et brouillard
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1956
length 32 minutes
Rod
Director Alain Resnais
script Jean Cayrol
production Anatole Dauman
Samy Halfon
Philippe Lifchitz
music Hanns Eisler
camera Ghislain Cloquet
Sacha Vierny
cut Alain Resnais
occupation

Nacht und Nebel (original title: Nuit et brouillard ), a French film, is the first documentary film about the extermination camps , especially the Auschwitz concentration camp , and the Holocaust during the Nazi regime after the end of the Second World War . The film was produced in 1955 by Anatole Dauman on the initiative of the historian Henri Michel . Directed led Alain Resnais . The film music was composed by Hanns Eisler .

Emergence

Right from the start, Alain Resnais insisted on making the film with the writer, resistance fighter against National Socialism and former prisoner of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, Jean Cayrol. In 1945 he had published a collection of poems entitled Poemes de la Nuit et du brouillard (translated into German: Night and Fog ), in which he processed his time in the Resistance and in the concentration camp. Cayrol wrote the script, wrote and spoke the lyrics. In the German version, Paul Celan was responsible for the lyrics. In the film, Resnais used weekly newsreels from the Allies of the liberation of Auschwitz and other concentration camps . In addition, he made a trip to Auschwitz and shot color shots with his cameraman Sacha Vierny to contrast them with the black and white shots of the newsreels. They took in the crumbling fence and ramshackle buildings. “They filmed the grass that now grew between the tracks, the rusted barbed wire of the electric fences, the cracks in the concrete walls of the gas chambers and, above all, the mountains of shoes and glasses of the murdered - including the mountains of hair that were given to them cut to make felt blankets out of it. These images made possible what no imagination had been able to do before: imagining the death of millions of people. The images of the mountains of corpses left the audience speechless and stunned, but the images of the mountains of glasses frames touched them. "

Artistic form

Nuit et brouillard lasts 32 minutes and combines documentary recordings and archival material in black and white with color sequences showing the crumbling Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp from 1955. Both levels of representation are technically precise and related to each other in contrapuntal terms.

The film music by Hanns Eisler is haunting and coordinated with the image sequences in black and white and color. Eisler's inspiration for music was the monologue of Horatio's from Hamlet , which he in Karl Kraus Judgment had read from the year 1919th

The colored picture sequences are underlaid with a text by the French writer Jean Cayrol . He had joined the French resistance movement in 1940, imprisoned in 1943 and deported to Mauthausen concentration camp . His poetic monologue recalls the everyday world of the concentration camps, the torture, humiliation, terror and extermination experienced there. The German translation is by Paul Celan ; it sometimes deviates from the original for poetic reasons and remained the only printed version for decades. The text was spoken by Kurt Glass. There was also a GDR version of the film, the translation of which was done by Henryk Keisch , spoken by Raimund Schelcher. The French film text was not printed until 1997.

The French government had enforced that original images from the Pithiviers camp had to be manipulated. A French policeman guarding the Jewish prisoners destined for deportation to Auschwitz, who was clearly recognizable by his uniform, had to be blackened out at the edge of the picture. This corresponded to the French government line up until the 1990s to deny an active collaboration with participation in the Holocaust that took place under the German occupation .

Performance history

More than 10 years after the end of World War II - in the middle of the Cold War - the film was finished in December 1955. Representatives of the German embassy saw him in advance at a private performance in Paris. The producer found her reaction to the film "icy". In January 1956 this received the French Jean Vigo Prize and in March was unanimously nominated as the French contribution to the Cannes Film Festival in April.

Thereupon the federal government demanded in a letter from the German ambassador von Maltzahn in Paris to the French foreign minister Christian Pineau that the candidacy be dismissed : in principle there was nothing wrong with the cinematic representation of Nazi crimes; but according to the regulations of the festival, the films in Cannes should contribute to friendship between peoples and not harm the national feeling of a country. This film will poison the atmosphere between the French and Germans and damage the reputation of the Federal Republic. The Cannes Film Festival is therefore not the appropriate forum for such a film. Because ordinary viewers are not able to distinguish between the criminal leaders of the Nazi regime and today's Germany.

Thereupon the French selection committee for the film festival struck the film on April 7, 1956 from its proposal list. This sparked ongoing protests in France as well as in the Federal Republic. A passionate public debate ensued for months. In France, organizations of resistance fighters and deportees and personalities of cultural life like Jean Cayrol took a critical position; Bernard Blier asked the responsible Minister of Commerce, Maurice Lemaire, for information about the German interference, who then allowed the demonstration outside the program on April 29 in Cannes, on the eve of the “National Day of Remembrance for the Deported”. In the Federal Republic of Germany prominent authors protested against the actions of the federal government, including Alfred Andersch , Heinrich Böll , Hans Georg Brenner , Walter Dirks , Wolfgang Hildesheimer , Eugen Kogon , Ernst Kreuder , Erich Kuby , Hans Werner Richter and Paul Schallück . The NDR broadcast its statement during the festival on April 16.

In the German Bundestag , the SPD asked for a current question time on the process. When asked about the reasons for the intervention, State Secretary Hans Ritter von Lex replied on April 18 that Cannes was not “the right place ... to show a film that can all too easily contribute to the hatred of the German people caused by the Nazi crimes to revive in its entirety. "

The behavior of the federal government and the French selection committee was almost unanimously rejected in foreign and German media. The London Times wrote on June 2, 1956:

"It is hard to feel anything other than anger towards those who withdrew this solemn and terrible elegy."

On June 29th, the film was shown in Bonn in front of 700 invited domestic and foreign press representatives, members of the Bundestag, civil servants and employees of some ministries and students. The initiative was taken by the Europäische Zeitung , the organ of German Youth for Europe in the European Movement . The visitors received questionnaires with evaluation options:

  • whether the film is perceived as objective, tendentious and anti-German
  • whether the memory of the Nazi crimes is urgently necessary, superfluous or harmful
  • whether the film triggers a healing shock, leaves the audience indifferent or repels them
  • whether it should be made available to as many, only selected circles as possible or not at all.

July 1, 1956 in the Capitol Cinema in West Berlin is considered the German premiere, at the same time it was shown at the 8th International Film Meeting in Bad Ems.

On July 4th, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger wrote about the public reactions observed by its correspondent, including many former concentration camp prisoners:

“If anywhere, there should have been an anti-German demonstration here. In fact, one could hardly have blamed it. But nothing of the sort happened. The French visitors did not make the mistake that the Federal Republic of Germany had actually recommended when they viewed the depiction of the atrocities of the Third Reich as a current charge against Germany through the protest. "

On August 1, the newspaper Le Monde reported in detail on the letter from the German embassy and the result of the survey from the Bonn demonstration:

  • 376 of the 412 viewers considered the film to be objective and fair; 14 found him tendentious and seven as anti-German.
  • 347 viewers felt it was urgent to show it in Germany, 40 as useless and nine as harmful.
  • 222 believed that he would be welcomed in Germany, 41 to a cautious, 38 to an indifferent acceptance, 37 to a rejection.
  • 263 viewers were in favor of widespread distribution of the film, 106 in favor of restricted; only eleven were against any demonstration.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung commented on the federal government's reasons on August 8th as an expression of an “over-anxious and at least difficult to understand concern”. The film was then shown to invited audiences in other German cities, including West Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Düsseldorf and Hanover.

The performance halls were crowded everywhere and the film sparked deep movement. The Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung wrote on February 12, 1957: “You will never forget this film. Everyone should see it. ”In the fall of 1956, the previews and surveys led the Federal Government's Press and Information Office and the Federal Center for Homeland Service to secure the rights for non-commercial use and to make over 100 copies available free of charge. Since December 1956, the film was also commercially available and u. a. shown in over 60 theaters in Berlin as well as countless matinees and special events.

At the beginning of May 1957, the Baden-Württemberg State Image Office decided to reject the film recommended by the Ministry of Culture for showing in secondary schools. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on May 3rd:

"The committee was of the opinion that the film could not be expected of the young people, who only have vague memories of the war, for educational reasons."

The general weekly newspaper of Jews in Germany wrote on May 17th:

“Precisely because one's own memories are so 'vague' as the Stuttgart Advisory Committee emphasized, concrete knowledge must be conveyed - not to reveal the sins of the fathers, but to protect the children from treading the same path of injustice and human contempt . "

On the 40th anniversary of the Reichspogromnacht , ZDF first broadcast the film on German television on November 9, 1978.

Israel

In Israel, too, the film was not allowed to be shown at the instigation of the film censorship authority and the Histadrut trade union federation .

Reviews

“Resnai's documentary film is one of the most important films about the German concentration camps. With the greatest stylistic restraint and an extremely sensitive German version by Paul Celan, a representation of the horror is worked out in which the contemporary reality of Auschwitz / Birkenau is counteracted with the documents of the Allied newsreel pictures. A film based on the memory of what cannot be portrayed: It anticipates the impossibility of dramatizing the Holocaust and disavows all cheap attempts to 'tell' the story of this monstrosity. "

- Lexicon of international film

reception

  • Uwe Johnson : Anniversaries (1970). The main character, who emigrated to America from Germany, sees the film in a New York film club.
  • Margarethe von Trotta : The Leaden Time (1981). In a scene that depicts her youth, the later member of the RAF (real role model: Gudrun Ensslin ) sees night and fog in a youth home . She leaves the room and vomits.
  • Christian Petzold : Internal Security (2000). Here it is the daughter of a terrorist couple who sees the last scene of the film Night and Fog in the 1990s . The girl is apparently far less affected by the film than the girl in von Trotta's film.

In addition, the poet Anne Duden , the writer Friedrich Christian Delius and the cultural scientist Helmut Lethen have written about how the film impressed and influenced them.

Prizes and awards

Title origin

The title first appeared in German on a book from 1946:

  • Arnold Weiss-Rüthel: Night and Fog. 1st & 2nd editions with subtitles: records from five years of protective custody. (157 p.) Kluger, Munich 1946; 3rd edition with subtitle: A Sachsenhausen book (195 pages) VVN , Potsdam, 1949

Forms of distribution

literature

  • Ewout van der Knaap (Ed.): "Night and Fog". Memory of the Holocaust and the history of its international impact Wallstein Verlag Göttingen 2008 ISBN 978-3-8353-0359-1
  • Bastian Reinert: Translating Memory: Acts of Testimony in Resnais, Cayrol, and Celan, in: Translating Holocaust Literature, ed. v. Peter Arnds, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2016, pp. 139–152.
  • Uncovering the Holocaust. The International Reception of "Night and Fog" Wallflower, 2006 ISBN 1-904764-65-7 . With contributions from Cora Kaplan, Sidney Perkowitz & Kirsten Moana-Thompson. TB ISBN 1-904764-64-9
  • Pia Bowinkelmann: Shadow World . The annihilation of the Jews, depicted in the French documentary Offizin, Hanover 2008 ISBN 978-3-930345-62-5 (other filmmakers themed there: Frédéric Rossif & Madeleine Chapsal: "Le Temps du ghetto" 1961; Marcel Ophüls : "The house next door . Chronicle of a French city at war "; Claude Lanzmann:" Shoah "and Claude Chabrol :" L'œil de Vichy "1993)
  • Sylvie Lindeperg: "Nuit et Brouillard". Un film dans l'histoire. Odile Jacob, Paris 2007
  • Hélène Raymond: Poétique du témoignage: Autour du film Nuit et brouillard d'Alain Resnais. L'Harmattan, Paris 2008
  • Sacha Vierny, Richard Raskin & Alain Resnais: "Nuit et Brouillard". On the Making, Reception and Functions of a Major Documentary Film Aarhus UP 1987 ISBN 87-7288-100-3
  • Walter Euchner : Suppressed coming to terms with the past . Motives of film politics in the Adenauer era. P. 347f: "The case of 'night and fog'". in: Rainer Eisfeld & Ingo Müller (eds.): Against barbarism. Essays in honor of Robert W. Kempner . Athenaeum, Frankfurt 1989 ISBN 3-610-08537-1
  • Anne-Berenike Binder: "Mon ombre est restée là-bas." Literary and media forms of remembering in space and time. Series: Romania Judaica. Studies on Jewish culture in the Romance countries. ISSN  1435-098X Niemeyer, Tübingen 2008 ISBN 978-3-484-57008-5 (also on books and films by Romain Gary , Soazig Aaron , Charlotte Delbo and Liliana Cavani )
  • Catrin Corell: The Holocaust as a Challenge for the Film. Forms of dealing with the Shoah on film since 1945. A typology of effects. Transcript, Bielefeld 2007 ISBN 3-89942-719-X ( readable in google books online, an excerpt from 41 pages see web links) plus diss. Univ. Mannheim 2006
  • Martina Thiele: Journalistic controversies about the Holocaust in film. Lit, Münster 2008 ISBN 3-8258-5807-3
  • Mirjam Schmid: Representability of the Shoah in novels and films. Kulturgeschichtliche Reihe, 12. Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2012 ISBN 978-3-933264-70-1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jan Cayrol: Poèmes de la Nuit et du Brouillard. Suivi de: Larmes publiques , Littérature Française, accessed on November 5, 2019
  2. ↑ Volker Schlöndorff analysis of the film from April 15, 2010 with the title “Night and Fog - 1955 Alain Resnais made a film about the camps of the National Socialists. His use of filmic means, which was unusual up to now, creates a distance that makes understanding possible. " [1]
  3. ↑ Ewout van der Knaap: Night and Fog. Memory of the Holocaust and its international impact. P. 24
  4. ↑ Ewout van der Knaap: Night and Fog. Memory of the Holocaust and its international impact. P. 83
  5. ↑ About the film from Die Welt , January 25, 2011. Keisch wrote about "Kelsch"
  6. ^ Fritz Bauer Institute, Cinematographie des Holocaust ( Memento from March 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), and Sylvie Lindeperg, see lit. The GDR version was therefore only shown in closed performances in this country
  7. ↑ Lindeperg, see Ref.
  8. ↑ Walter Euchner: Suppressed coming to terms with the past. Motives of film politics in the Adenauer era. P. 347f: "The case of 'night and fog'". in: Rainer Eisfeld & Ingo Müller (eds.): Against barbarism. Essays in honor of Robert W. Kempner . Athenaeum, Frankfurt 1989 ISBN 3-610-08537-1
  9. ↑ Release dates, IMDb
  10. ^ Anne Paech: The School of the Spectators. On the history of the German film club movement. In: Hilmar Hoffmann , Walter Schobert (Ed.): Between yesterday and tomorrow. West German post-war film 1946–1962 . Kommunales Kino, Frankfurt 1989. PDF, p. 17.
  11. ↑ A final clarification of how far up the German fight against the film was made is made more difficult by the fact that the Paris embassy claimed to Euchner in 1988 that it had destroyed all files by 1965. Presumably Adenauer was behind this, who only wanted state films for films with a political reference.
  12. ^ Frankfurter Rundschau: " Kulenkampffs shoes ", Das Erste: nuances in the entertainment business . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . ( fr.de [accessed on August 8, 2018]).
  13. ↑ Nitzan Lebovic: An absence that leaves traces , in: Ewout van der Knaap (Ed.): "Night and Fog": Memory of the Holocaust and international impact history , Wallstein Verlag, 2008, pp. 141–162. ISBN 978-3-8353-0359-1 .
  14. ↑ Night and Fog. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 20, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  15. ↑ Uwe Johnson. Anniversaries. From the life of Gesine Cresspahl. Suhrkamp, ​​1996. Vol. 1.2, p. 852
  16. ↑ Ewout van der Knaap (Ed.): "Night and Fog". Memory of the Holocaust and its international impact, p. 61ff.
  17. ↑ Ewout van der Knaap (Ed.): "Night and Fog". The memory of the Holocaust and its international impact, p. 65.
  18. ↑ Ewout van der Knaap (Ed.): "Night and Fog". The memory of the Holocaust and its international impact, p. 110ff.
  19. ↑ Night and Fog. Music for the documentary 'Nuit et Brouillard' by Alain Resnais, ed. Oliver Dahin (Orch.) 1955, duration: 30 ' , Breitkopf & Härtel, accessed on November 5, 2019
  20. ↑ in 1987 the book could be written with the exact script that u. a. the state influence proves not appear in France
  21. ↑ readable in Google books. For German intervention against the Auff. in Cannes
  22. ↑ Focus: "Night and Fog" and André Schwarz-Bart , The Last of the Righteous , Roman