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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

NIGHT AND FOG..MUST WATCH!

The misery of human life. The worthlessness of human life. The debasing of human life. Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog revisits the ghoulish experience of the Jews in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, the largest of those created for the very purpose of extermination.

The contrasting parallels drawn- from present to past, from colour to black, from simplicity to complexity, from beauty of the landscape to the horrors that it witnessed, they charm, they enthral and they horrify.

Right from the beginning, the to and fro from the present in colour to the past of black is significant of details more than one. It not only signifies the blackness of the time as it brought darkness to the lives of so many- 3 million to be close but the darkness of the deed in itself. The brutality of it in the way it was contracted like they are merchants of death, the people just but a need to make money. To quote Himmler, “we must exterminate productively.”

The concentration began with rounding up of people who knew not what they had done, who knew not that they may not see the light of the future, who just knew that things were about to get grim for them. The camps constructed with all the necessities that a new development site desires- beds, toilets (even if just holes in the floor), kitchens, hospitals and later a CREMATORIUM (read: Scientific gassing rooms for mass killing with nail scratchings on the ceiling as the only sign that people were in there once), just waited for one thing more- the inmates to fill the place, to never leave it again. The horror of being loaded 100 to a bogie in the train that left its source in darkness to reach its destination in darkness to commit the sin that will haunt for generations to come. The people locked inside like animals being offloaded to an unwarranted destination because they don’t serve their purpose anymore.

The movement back to the future at this point brings us back to the reality that this was an event of the past but whose memories will live on making the place so barren in nature and empty because all life there was exterminated to never come back again.
The impact of showing the empty bunks of today while talking of them overflowing with people in the past to glorify the fact of what it must have felt like to be there, to be a part of those tormented souls is more than it could be, if shown directly. The imagination draws incomprehensible parallels instead of the clear picture drawn with bluntness.

The irony of the SS slogans of “Cleanliness is health”, A louse means death”, “work liberates” and “to each his due” compared to the life of the people evokes a disgust within oneself for the hypocrisy of mankind. But the human nature was portrayed from the other side as well (as a ray of hope)- the tendency of man to be resilient even if the grimmest of hours, the ability to think, to pray, to help another weak, the basic humanity forgotten by the Nazis, still untouched by the physical torture as was the case of the prisoners.

The war turned all to stone but the heights reached in the mania of war is brought out in the plight of the patients at the hospital- first empty and shown in colour to draw the viewer in the façade of the structure and then throw them again in the past of black to show the actuality of it and the medical disaster that it was- experimentation, needless operations, fun and games with the lives of the patients because the rulers of the place felt in the mood to do so.

The subject of the brutality of the murders in the gassing chambers is dealt with by the visuals of disturbing nature that jar the mind. The ovens used in the crematorium indicate the cold-blooded nature of the monstrosity of the Holocaust that strips a person of dignity as even the dead body is not left alone, even that is put to “productive” use like the women’s hair could be made into excellent carpet and the bones could be used as fertilizer, a futile attempt.

The gruesomeness reaches the peak level as the dead bodies are shoved into pits with bulldozers pushing them, they were but humans, nothing much. The presence of the shots in the film indicate the determination of the director to make you realise that if watching it is painful, imagine the pain of going through it.

The back and forth thus became necessary as it was important to see the today’s implications of yesterdays deeds. What looks like sunny landscape is the home of terror needs to be reiterated to remind that it is not past, it is just dormant to erupt again when the time comes, that no deed goes unpunished, no act goes unforgotten.

To document the same in another way, it may be a possibility to locate the survivors of the Holocaust and take a first hand account of the brutality, to bring it back to life in thoughts of those who lived it. To each his own, for now let Resnais take the centre stage.

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