‘Like in a poem, the key in a film is
situated neither in the development nor the argument, but in the vibration of
the images and its music’ (Ruiz, 2004:14)
Since its beginnings in the last decades of
the 19th century, cinema has been a powerful medium that influences how we see
and think about the world. Through films we have experienced situations, places
and realities in a way that no other medium or art form could offer us. As a
kind of ‘pan-art’ (Sontag, 1966: 245) cinema has freshly combined elements
coming from poetry, dance, painting, theatre and music. Its uniqueness relies
in the sensorial experience that echoes the most inner emotional engagements of
the human intellect. In such way, the technological means that cinema possesses
–constantly being refined and perfected- structures an audiovisual universe
that mingles styles of high emotions in order to express, in innumerable
manners, human experiences. It is not coincidence then that the term cinema was
named after the Greek word kinema,
meaning both motion and emotion.
In what follows, this essay
will sketch some connections between cinema as a language of emotions and its
capacity to awake empathic responses in the viewer, especially when it comes to
experiences relating the suffering of others. By using Night and Fog as an early example of the human rights film, we will
analyse the performative capacity that Resnais’ documentary possesses in both
questioning and emotionally engaging with the viewer. Furthermore, the film
will also serve as a discussion of contemporary human right issues, reflecting cinema’s
capacity to tell stories from a first person perspective. The shift towards the
new millennia will be crucial to understand some of the challenges that the
medium has to address in order to authentically connect with the other and to
depict with great accuracy the pluralistic world that we live in.
As a language that speaks through emotions,
cinema has aspired to become a universal one. Nevertheless, as any moving
language, its elements have also varied through time. When films were silent
and nevertheless technology to record people’s voices was available, moving
image itself excited the inventors and their audiences so much that recorded
soundtrack was not a necessary condition to enlighten the public. As film
historian Mark Cousins suggests, the absence of language barriers had its
practical implications, because it ‘ensured that the birth of cinema was truly
international and the films of the first decade were shown all over the world’
(2006:18).
During the late 1920s, something else happened
to cinema’s pretention of universality: filmmakers discovered that sound could
make their films more personal by giving voice to the characters’ thoughts. The
sound era made cinema more intimate and suddenly images were not the primary
focus to draw film-goers into deep emotional exchanges.
But it is the third epoch, that of digital
filmmaking, that has challenged cinema even more fundamentally than the
introduction of sound. Before the 1990s –and more radically before the 1950s-,
the walls around the world of film production only allowed a few lucky ones to
enter into the exclusive citadel of film. The costs of shooting and editing,
technical equipment and crew meant that the possibility of filming
independently was rather illusory. Cinema had to rely in studios and sponsors
who would subsidy filmmaker’s crafts in exchange of a no lower cost; that of
the autonomy to speak freely. For that reason, the introduction of digital
technology towards the end of the XX century has opened a third moment for film
–which is still properly developing- that can be said to be fully ‘the first
meritocratic one’ (Cousins: 2006: 215).
Consequently, if we agree that cinema is a
highly emotional medium, the power of its language has finally broken free from
constraints of the past. The depiction of the world is no longer a privilege for
a few and neither is it a top-down built project. The chances to tell stories
with a first person voice and to stretch our sensibility with one another
through the screen has made possible, adopting Wilson & Brown’s expression,
to ‘mobilize empathy’ (2009: 2) and to use it in order to denounce the
suffering and many human right violations occurring across the world. The
primacy of cinema as a medium to be used to condemn unfairness relies, I
believe, in the assumption that our actions and ethical responses against injustice
have always arisen from our emotions; that is exactly what Wilson and Brown
insistently suggest. Furthermore, if cinema is in a privileged position to
mobilize the human emotional fabric, then it should never settle to project
passive contemplation, but to promote ‘immediate action to the end of suffering
across the globe’ (2009: 3). Echoing what Walter Benjamin once suggested,
cinema has finally come to be fully underpinned by a new practice; that of
political action (2008)
This sort of epistemological earthquake has
also occurred along the shift towards the new millennium. In his animated
presentation at RSA Animate, Roman Krznaric (2012) has pointed out that the 20th
century was the age of introspection, an era where the best way to discover who
we were was to look deep inside ourselves. Even when I totally agree with Krznaric,
he forgets to mention a no less important detail. Gazing at our own mirror not
only hasn’t helped us to discover what to do with our lives, but most
importantly, that the mirror has been simultaneously directed to assimilate the
western self in the marginalized other: the non-western, non modern and non
human. As Susane Sontag has pointed out, 20th century epistemology was ‘pledged
to a kind of applied Hegelianism seeking its Self in its exotic Other’ (1966: 69).
Thus, the primacy of the ego
erforming a referential point for truth and interpretation is found along this
century in a sort of psychoanalytical introspection where the signifying subject
seats on the couch but where the thing signified stays out.
In the light of this reasoning, I propose to
paraphrase Krznaric’s term differently. Rather than calling it ‘the age of
introspection’ (2012: 2), echoing Viveiros de Castro’s unfinished project
(2014), I would name it the age of Narcissus; the Greek mythological character
who by always seeing its own reflection in the outside, ended up in a very
blind domain where what he only cared about was exclusively what interested
him: himself. Narcissus of course is Western subjectivity here.
But if the 20th century was colonized by
Western thought, the 21th century has to be different. According to Krznaric:
‘Instead of an age of introspection we need to shift to an age of
outrospection’ (2012: 2). By this he means that in order to discover who we are
we need to step outside ourselves. Then, following my own terms it would be the
age of Anti-Narcissus, a moment were the decolonization of thought returns to
us –through cinema for example- an image of the other as an experience and as
an occasion to play with our own. True empathy then, would be to step into
somebody else’s world view, by understanding ‘their beliefs, their fears, the
experiences that shape how they look at the world and how they look at
themselves’ (2012: 2). So, if Narcissus was the candidate to determine the
criteria that separated the western from the non western, then Anti Narcissus
would be the image of a pluralistic discourse cohabiting in a shared world. Consequently,
empathy does not rely any more in our capacity to impose, but to connect with
each other.
In order to connect films matter, indeed. Cinema
moves, because as a time-based art, it depends on precisely that kind of
intensity: the movement of emotion, e-motion. As Raul Ruiz used to say: ‘a film
moves, or it dies’ (2004: 45). Shortly, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955) will be analysed in order to address some of
the issues discussed above. It will be an opportunity to illustrate the
capacity of film to create an empathic response in the viewer. Also, it will be
a chance to exemplify Narcissus’ episteme
and the problem concerning the suffering of others that the documentary
depicts. Night and Fog sets a
socio-historical context that some could easily claim to be well buried in the
past. However, as we argue, the documentary presents historical footage
mediating a traumatic past that uncovers issues of discrimination connected
with our daily routine.
The United Nations, along with many
international human right organizations have agreed to determine that ‘the
treatment of human beings as commodities, or products to be bought and sold, is
considered a violation of their most basic rights to freedom, autonomy and
human dignity’ (In Fergus, 2005: 1). Consequently, a documentary that touches
on the holocaust tragedy would appear as a central figure for the human rights
film project. According to Daan Bronkhorst (2003), Night and Fog functions as an early example of such documentary
tradition, not only because it reflects human rights violations against a
particular group of people, but most importantly, because it is a story that claims
‘to follow the truth’ (2003: 9). In order to operationalize truth, Bronkhorst
draws a conceptual framework borrowed from Habermas. He states that:
‘A communication to convey the truth must
first of all correspond to the facts. Second, it should comply with
a normative system within which both those who make a statement and
those who receive it are able to make judgments. And third, the most
interesting element and the most difficult to define, a true statement
should be sincere, honest, i.e. "truthful".’ (2003: 9)
Night
and Fog seeks to convey a sense of truthfulness in what it depicts. First, it
relies on footage that focuses on a particular abuse based on historical evidence.
Second, it is clear to denounce human right violations and to set
responsibility for those; it further makes a judgment about the holocaust open for the public
to interpret. And thirdly, Resnais presents his own vision of things by
violently introducing the question of evil surrounding the concentration camps.
It is in such a way that cinema here not only deals with a matter of aesthetics:
It is a matter of ethics rather than aesthetics what the documentary is looking
at.
The film also questions the viewer in many
respects. By stressing memory over history, Night
and Fog displays an emotional desire to make the audience feel and remember
something traumatic: Why and what should we remember of a catastrophe like the
holocaust? The stylistic and technical devices to create empathic
responses can be drawn from what Bill Nichols has defined as the ‘performative
mode of documentary’ (2010: 124). As he suggests: ‘a performative documentary
stresses emotional involvements rather than rational and intellectual
engagements’ (2010: 124). In fact, even when Night and Fog has depended on
commentary to tell a story about the holocaust, it relies less heavily to convey information than to
convey emotion. In this way, the voice over that accompanies the footage of the
concentration camps exposes an affective dimension that stresses a sense of
lived experience. It suggests that an intellectual comprehension of the world
is somehow incomplete without an emotional response. In this regard, it is
relevant to notice that the commentary in the film is neither anonymous nor
abstract. The text has been written by camp survivor Jean Cayrol, and it is in
such a way that his tone reflects the strongly personal quality producing an
emotional engagement in the viewer.
Night
and Fog depicts memory in black and white with unbearable images from the
concentration camps. In stark contrast to this grey past, Resnais visually introduces
his historical present through all the calmness and colourfulness of a vast
prairie:
‘Even a peaceful landscape (…)
can lead to a concentration camp. Strüthof, Oranienburg, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Belsen, Ravensbruck,
Dachau. These were names like any others on maps and in guide books.’ (1995)
From Resnais’ point of view,
memory stands out as a vital tool to prevent a recurrence of the original
catastrophe. In line with Hannah Arendt’s seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1967), comments on the Nazi
national project -its desire to become a free zone from the alien intruder- are
also underpinned by the ‘vibration’ (Ruiz, 2014: 14) of the film. The music
composed by Hanns Eisler, an exile from the Nazi Germany, is loaded with
elements of the Deutschlandlied. The
German national anthem is poetically introduced into the Westerbork sequence, right
at the moment when the transport is being boarded with Jews. Here, the
examination of the Nazi past and the question of national guilt are sensory
embedded to stress our empathic involvement with the ‘rightless Jew’ (1967:
267). As Arendt has suggested, 20th century Europe constructed a new political
domain, a moment in history where European nations had put forward a political
framework to define who is considered citizen and who is not in order to
guarantee national rights. Thus, by denationalizing and creating new categories
of people, ‘the stateless Jew’ appeared. According to Arendt, the decline of the
Nation-State emerging in Germany at the beginnings of the century -but rapidly
expanding across Europe- disintegrated the most basic sense of humanity that
human rights declarations can proclaim: ‘The calamity of the rightless is not
that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursue of happiness (...) but that
they no longer belong to any community whatsoever’ (1967: 295).
In a similar direction,
Zygmunt Bauman has sketched controversial links between Nazi’s regime and the
modern industry. In his book Modernity
and the Holocaust (1989), Bauman has stated that whether it is a
concentration camp or a modern factory, the same instrumental rationality is
displayed; no matter the means employed to pursue the objectives. Here and
there, efficient decisions are driven by market conditions and managed by
bureaucrats, engineers, bidders and investors. Bauman seems to be echoing
Resnais’ words: ‘A concentration camp is built the same way a stadium or a
hotel is built: with businessmen, estimates, competitive bids, and no doubt a
bribe or two.’ (1995).
Holocaust and modernity share instrumental
rationality as a common principle. The treatment of human beings as commodities,
dehumanized as the Jews, traded as products to be bought and sold in a world
market economy, still bringing us the breeze of the atrocities committed under
the name of totalitarian politics. The kapo
and the official claimed not to be responsible for the atrocities occurred. So,
who is responsible in the new millennia for the asylum seekers, starvation in
Africa, the working conditions of children in developing countries,
sex-trafficking, global warming, and so on? Along with Resnais, Arendt and
Bauman, my reply would be rather pragmatic: evil appears when lack of reflection
rules. ‘Banality’ (Arendt, 2006: 2) has come to support and legitimate an evil reality
with blind eyes towards the human rights of the human others.
Night and Fog presents many signs of the
cinema’s sound era earlier described. The film was released in 1995 and the
director had both a limited budget and a time schedule in which to produce the
documentary. As Ewout van der Knaap (2006) points out, Resnais signed a
contract on 24 May 1995 and, due to subsidy, had to finish the film before 24
December of that year. Constraints were also carried out by French
authorities. The French Board of Film Censors demanded to remove a scene in
which a French policeman on active duty appeared, mainly because ‘they were
afraid of insulting the authorities of the day’ (2006: 10). Nevertheless, even
when restrictions and top-down orders have applied, Resnais’ autonomy to speak
freely was not revoked. As a result, the emotional impact of the film is deep
and convincing, because it has shown us what real people suffer in the real
world.
Night
and Fog also mingles between Narcissus and the XXI century episteme. True empathy, as we have stated,
relies in our capacity to step into somebody else’s world view. In cinema it
means that we have the chance to tell and hear stories from a first person
voice, like Cayrols’ for example. But the real protagonist of human right
stories, as Bronkhorst has suggested, ‘are those local people reflecting their
actual state of human right violation’ (2003: 13) Wouldn’t Night and Fog be more ‘truthful’ and authentic if the same story
had been told by the Jews who actually suffered those right violations? The
unfeasibility to undertake such endeavour during the 1950s as prisoners in the
concentration camps makes the question somehow tricky. But now, the
possibilities to shoot with a digital camera smaller than a loaf of bread and to
use crews of two rather than fifty people has allowed cinema to address human
right issues from the testimony and experience of its protagonist; the local
culture and the unmodified other. In such way, when the camera becomes the
protagonists’ own eyes, cinema outrospects: it connects with the beliefs, fears
and experiences that others might have to tell.
Today it is time to articulate a different
cosmology, one that embraces diversity and reconciles the particular reality
with the universal character of our rights. And films can be powerful, because
as a language of emotions, they move. But the kind of energy that cinema possess
is not its own; energy is everywhere in the cosmos. And that same energy holding
the planet, which attracts the sun and our bodies, is the kind of aura that animates
the telling of our stories and makes us connect with one another through the
screen.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arendt, Hannah (1967) The Origins of Totalitarianism. George
Allen and Unwin. 3rd ed.
Arendt, Hannah (2006) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil. Pinguin Classics. London: 312
Bandis, Helen. Martin,
Adrian. & McDonald, Grant (2004). Raúl
Ruiz: Images of Passage. Rouge Press & International Film Festival
Rotterdam: 114
Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) Modernidad y Holocausto. Sequitur
Editions. Madrid: 272.
Benjamine, Walter (2008)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction. Pinguin Books. London: 111
Bronkhorst, Daan (2003) Human Rights Film Network: Reflections on
its History, Principles and Practices. Amnesty International Film Festival.
Amsterdam.
Cousins, Mark (2006). The Story of Film. Pavilion Books.
London: 512.
Fergus, Lara
(2005) Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation. Australian Centre for the
Study of Sexual Assault. ACSSA Briefings, no. 5, June: 42
Krznaric, Roman (2012) Outrospection. RSA Animate. London: 4.
Nichols, Bill. (2010) Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film
Studies. Norton & Company Ltd. New York: 545.
Pollok,
Griselda & Silverman, Max (2011) Concentrationary Cinema:
Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog. Berghahn Books: 358.
Sontage, Susan (1966) Against Interpretation and Other Essays.
Picador. New York: 312.
Van der Knaap, Ewout
(2006) Uncovering the Holocaust: The
International Reception of Night and Fog. Wallflower Press.
Viveiros de
Castro, Eduardo (2014). Cannibal
Metaphysics. Univocal Publishing LLC. Minneapolis: 245.
Wilson, Richard A. &
Brown, Richard D. (2009) Humanitarianism
and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy. Cambridge University Press.
FILMS
Resnais,
Alain (1955) Night and Fog France:
Argos Films
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