The Music of Night and Fog

This blog was written for the Filmmusic Blog-A-Thon over at Windmills of My Mind

Francois Truffaut called Alain Resnais' Night and Fog "the best film ever made." High praise has followed ever since, and now it is considered one of the most important works about the Holocaust. I have heard and read, however, many people equate the movie's brilliance with its horrific imagery only. Not only does this thought ignore the value of the superb score by Hanns Eisler or the text by Jean Cayrol, it ignores Resnais' status as an artist who orchestrates many different elements to create one work of art.

It's not that the film's score has been ignored by the critical community, but more that a simple fact must be repeated: the music here makes the movie, not alone, but in tandem with the terse words written by Jean Cayrol (dryly spoken by Michel Bouquet) and the images. Considering that Resnais only shot a few scant minutes of this thirty minute film (the rest is newsreel footage), it's no surprise that the overall package is disregarded and instead any individual part is glorified in its place. On that note, I ask you to forgive me: I'm going to glorify Night and Fog's score, but I do not do so to isolate it from the rest of the film. Rather I want to show that the image/music/text interaction creates a philosophical perspective that did not require horrific images, even though Night and Fog has plenty.

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Hanns Eisler's music is the antithesis of an emotional film score, and it rejects later more popular notions of how a Holocaust movie should be scored. It is the complete opposite of John Williams' minor-key violin in Schindler's List, as the films are opposites; one movie is concerned with the fallibility of knowledge and the fragility of memory in the face of human depravity, while the other is mere emotional make-believe and a high-minded blame game. The scores of the two films reflect the difference.

Hanns Eisler's score is modern: with pulsing rhythms reminiscent of Stravinsky, it changes patterns often and repeats itself only occasionally. It alternates between powerful, emotional melodies and noisy passages that jar us and grab our attention. It seems to offer us meaning, a music that sums up the Holocaust - in the end, by combination of words, music, and images, it is clear that meaning is lost, that nothing can describe human suffering. The film ultimately declares art unable to communicate atrocity, ("useless to describe what went on in these cells" or "no description, no image can reveal their true dimension") and when we eventually do see rotting corpses, the aftermath of torture, or mass killings, we understand just how much images fail, since they disgust without saddening us. Even when considered within the whole context of World War II, the images fail to comprehend the massive terror that was wrought on humanity. The film instead believes that art can communicate our failures as people, our rejection of truth, and our resistance to memory.


I am using three sections from Night and Fog that I think help illuminate how Eisler's music follows this pattern.

If you hit play and read slowly, the music should time up with the blog. There are four music pieces and four sections below to read as you listen.

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Opening

Although the overture that runs over the credits is a mournful string piece, here we're treated to a light-hearted flute who seems unaware of the deeper wind instrument (a clarinet?) that contrasts with its sweet melody and undermines the musical peace. Note also the soft tympani that drive the duet.

As we are listening to this music we are shown an image of a sunny countryside, but as the camera pans down we find it is confined by barbed wire.


Resnais continues this trick with other pastoral images from around the concentration camps, juxtaposing beauty with ugliness. Eisler's divided score speaks perfectly to the images while staying separate from it.



Work Makes Free

When we are first introduced to the sight of the camps, Eisler's music becomes flamboyantly atonal, using a pounding piano and a lost trumpet grasping for notes to evoke how terrible and unknown this place is. There is no voiceover for this shot, leaving the images and the sound free to interact and contrast. Though the camera moves elegantly, the gate has an ominous message: "Work Makes Free", or work will save you. The darkness of the shot matches the dark tones of the chosen instruments.





The Barracks


First let's note the text that runs over this color passage:

Who does know anything? The reality of these camps, despised by those who built them, and unfathomable to those who endured them - what hope do we have of truly capturing this reality?

Here the images are warm and thin, evoking nothing. The camera is again elegant in its movements, but it too communicates little. The text informs us that what we are seeing is horrible, but the image seems to contradict. Eisler's insistent march (underneath a flute and later replaced by a trumpet) seems to compel inspection, which is what Resnais is asking us to do: look at the ordinary, try and understand what happened, but know that you will fail. The flute and trumpet both are grasping at straws, just like the instruments in the previous passage.


"Is it in vain that we try to remember?" the narrator later says.



The Ending
Though the score has many emotions, only this piece, played at the beginning and end, is overly mournful. However, Cayrol's text informs us that we are not mourning those dead, but ourselves.

"I am not responsible," says the Kapo.

"I am not responsible," says the officer.

"I am not responsible."

Then who is responsible?

As I speak to you now, the icy water of the ponds and ruins fills the hollows of the mass graves, a frigid and muddy water, as murky as our memory.

and later

Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own? Somewhere in our midst, lucky Kapos still survive, reinstated officers and anonymous informers. There are those who refused to believe, or believed only for brief moments. With our sincere gaze we survey these ruins, as if the old monster lay crushed forever beneath the rubble. We pretend to take up hope again as the image recedes into the past, as if we were cured once and for all of the scourge of the camps. We pretend it all happened only once at a given time and place. We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us and a deaf ear to humanity's never-ending cry.

Resnais' film is a funeral march for humanity. Eisler's score is the dirge that moves it forward.