From Word To Word

This last Sunday fell very close to Remembrance Day, which is celebrated on November 11th here in Canada, so I decided to show the Senior High class Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, one of the great holcaust films, and one that would raise some of the larger issues that I have with the ways that we tend to remember.

The film’s strength is the tone that it is able to maintain.  Most holocaust films, and most films dealing with similarly horrific events, tend to rely for their effect on the kind of emotional responses that people have to the shocking images.  They are less aesthetic objects with their own aesthetic sensibility, then they are an exploitation of an object of horror to provoke emotions in the viewer.  As a response to this approach, other films have attempt to remain rigorously factual, presenting the objects of horror with an attitude of detachment, which is equally mi representative of its subject.

Night and Fog, however, avoids both of these extremes.  While it does present much disturbing archival material, and while it does include much information about the holocaust, it does so in a way that is less concerned with these things than in creating an aesthetic object that would do justice to these things.  In juxtaposition to the archival footage, it presents long and continuous shots of the Nazi death camps more than a decade after they were captured by the allies.  The camps are eerily empty, overgrown with vegetation, littered with the implements of their former occupants.  It is easy to imagine that ghostly hands still wield the machinery of death, that spectral prisoners in their multitudes are still herded into the death chambers and fed into the ovens.

The effect of the archival images and Resnais’ new shots together is a violent disjunction.  The lived horror of the one is brutally opposed to the ghostly tranquility of the other, and the relationship between them is reduced to an always inadequate memorial of the one by the other.  The juxtapositin  says, in effect, that it is impossible to recapture the events of the holocaust, that it is only possible to remember them in one fashion or another, and also that our forms of memory have been and continue to be implicated in the kinds of violence that is being remembered.  The narrator himself makes this argument as the film closes, noting that the memory of the holocaust has not prevented the occurrence of similar atrocities since, a fact that our forms of memorial fail to remember.

It is this occluded memory that I find so difficult in the celebration of Remembrance Day, and it is this occluded memory that I tried to explain to my class on Sunday.  I certainly do recognize the importance of remembering the things that we remember, but I am disturbed that our remembrance of these things is too often a refusal to remember the many other things that similarly need a memorial, a refusal to remember our own participation in these other things, a refusal to remember that these things are occurring even now and that we are even now implicated in them.  For many years, there was a slogan attached to Remembrance day: “Never Again”.  We repeated these words to each other, year after year, comfortably separated by time and geography from the events that we were remembering, and failing absolutely to recognize that wwhat we were remembering was happening again and again, continually.

To the extent, therefore, that Remembrance Day is a call to remember particular wars in particular places, I would say that it can only prevent us from truly remembering.  In order for it to produce in us a true memorial, it must always also be a recollection of ongoing war and violence and atrocity, a refusal to ignore the fact of these things in our past and in our present.