Full Description
FranÇois Truffaut called Night and Fog "the greatest film ever made." But when Alain Resnais finished his documentary, with its depiction of Nazi atrocities, the resistance of the French censors was fierce. A mere decade had passed since the end of the war, and the French public was unprepared to confront the horrors shown in the film-let alone the possibility of French complicity. In fact it would be through Night and Fog that many viewers first learned, as film critic Serge Daney put it, "that the worst had only just taken place."
An engrossing account of the genesis, production, and legacy of Resnais's incomparable film, this book documents in extraordinary detail how a film that began as a cinematic spin-off of an educational exhibition on "resistance, liberation, and deportation" went on to become a significant step in the building of a collective consciousness of the tragedy of World War II. Sylvie Lindeperg frames her investigation with the story of historian Olga Wormser-Migot, who played an integral role in the research and writing of Night and Fog-and whose slight error on one point gave purchase to the film's detractors and revisionists and Holocaust deniers. Lindeperg follows the travails of Resnais, Wormser-Migot, and their collaborators in a pan-European search for footage, photographs, and other documentation. She uncovers creative use of liberation footage to stand in for daily life of the camps featured to such shocking effect in the film-a finding that raises hotly debated questions about reenactment and witnessing even as it enhances our understanding of the film's provenance and impact.
A microhistory of a film that altered the culture it reflected, Night and Fog offers a unique interpretation of the interworking of biography, history, politics, and film in one epoch-making cultural moment.
Contents
Contents
Foreword
Jean-Michel Frodon
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations
Prologue: Olga Wormser-Migot, the Missing Link
Part I. Inception: A Breakdown of Gazes
1. The "Invisible Authority": The Stakes of a Commission
2. The " Merchants of Shadows": A French-Polish Coproduction
3. A Journey to the East: Research and Documentation
4. Writing Four Hands
5. The Adventurous Gaze
6. The Darkness of the Editing Room
7. Suffocated Words: A Lazarian Poetry
8. Eisler's Neverending Chant
Part II. Passage and Migration
9. Tug of War with the Censors
10. The Cannes Confusion: Dissecting a Scandal
11. Germany Gets Its First Look
12. Exile from Language: Paul Celan, Translator
13. Translation Battles in the GDR
14. A Portable Memorial
15. Shifting Perspectives: An Educational Institution
16. Constructing the Cinephilic Gaze
Epilogue: Olga's Tomb
Notes
Index
