of land that has become a wasteland,”
Cayrol describes, as Resnais tours the
Auschwitz facilities. “An incinerator
could be made to look like a picture
postcard.” Later he slips in a dose of
dramatic irony, saying that, “What
looked like a shower welcomed the
arrivals.” The viewer recognizes
immediately that the showers are gas
chambers, a secret known to audi-
ences only through historical hind-
sight. Cayrol then describes the oddi-
ties that collected at individual camps
during the war: a full symphony, a zoo,
an orphanage, a green house, an
invalid bay, Goethe’s oak. “Then the
real world, the world of the past,
seems far—yet not so far?” Cayrol
asks, once Resnais has directed us
through these images. His words cap-
ture the disparity between camp life
and the outside world; the comman-
dant’s attempts to introduce beauty or
“respite” appear anomalous and inap-
propriate, and thus only further
expose the inescapable brutality of
the Nazi regime.

Further on in the film, Cayrol
introduces us to the surgical block. “It
almost looks like a nursing home,” he
says. Resnais leads us into the “nurs-
ing home” via black-and-white
images of mutilated, castrated,
burned, and otherwise tortured vic-
tims of Nazi medical experiments; he

cuts from the color footage of the -

block’s peaceful exterior to the stark
horror of its interior. The still photo-
graph of an S.S. doctor is shown,
looking smug and cheerful, after
which we see archive footage of a
Nazi nurse, speaking calmly and con-
fidently. The casual nonchalance of
the Nazi workers, and of Cayrol’s

voice, seems to suggest an atmosphere
of sterility and tranquility, as would be
found in a nursing home or clean sub-
urban hospital. Through Resnais’ jux-
taposition of the torture imagery,
however, we have already seen evi-
dence to contradict this peaceful
vision.

The theme that emerges by the end
of the film is Resnais’ desire for the
viewer to recognize not only the hor-
ror of war, but also its repeatability.
“War nods, but has one eye open,”
Cayrol tells us. Rather than striving
for empathy, Resnais wisely chooses a
format for his film that educates and
awakens. He recognizes that his
responsibility as an artist/historian of
the Holocaust requires that he move
beyond a simple, temporary catharsis.
The examples described demonstrate
his preoccupation with exposing the
simplicity of the apparatus of Nazi
warfare. The opening shot is discon-
certing precisely because it reminds us
that Nazi tools were simple and “ordi-
nary.” “The skill of the Nazis is child’s
play today,” Cayrol warns. “There are
those who look at these ruins today, as
though the monster were dead and
buried beneath them.” Cayrol’s use of
irony throughout the film not only
prevents the viewer from falsely
inserting him or herself into the
Holocaust story, but also demonstrates
how danger lurks behind benign
facades. Through his meditative doc-
umentation, Resnais evokes our mem-
ories of the past as a warning for the
future.

Bibliography
Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and
After. New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1995.

Haidu, Peter. “The Dialectics of
Unspeakability.” Probing the Limits of
Representation. Ed. Saul Friedlander.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1992.

Kreidl, John Francis. Alain Resnais.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

Langer, Lawrence. “Fictional Facts
and Factual Fictions: History in
Holocaust Literature.” Admitting the
Holocaust: Collected Essays. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the
Saved. New York: Summit Books,
1986.

Monaco, James. Alain Resnais. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Resnais, Alain. Nuit et Bruillard.
1956.

Rich, B. Ruby. “She Says, He Says:
The Power of the Narrator in
Modernist Film Politics.” Gender and
German Cinema: Feminist
Interventions. Eds. Sandra Frieden,
Richard McCormick, Vibeke
Peterson, and _ Laurie Melissa
Vogelsang. Oxford: Berg Publishers,
Inc., 1993. Vol. 1.

Sweet, Freddy. The Film Narratives
of Alain Resnais. Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1981.

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