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Lower the camera and the pastoral sprawl is suddenly tangled in barbed wire, memory and cinema are like that. How does one contemplate something like the Holocaust? Tracking shots give modern glimpses of sun-dappled ruins while flickering black-and-white newsreels and stills depict life and death in concentration camps, the tranquil horror of contrasts. "The machine gets under way." Grass now grows on railroad tracks, not long ago the boxcars were used for corralling people. (A Vichy soldier watches the deportation, his cap obscured in an attempt at censoring a picture about culpability.) The titular elements welcome the prisoners at the gates, part of the "nocturnal extravaganzas" favored by the Nazi. "First impression: The camp is another planet." A society erected on institutionalized degeneracy, cataloged top to bottom by the matter-of-fact dismay of Jean Cayrol's text. The kommandant and the kapo, the factory and the brothel, the mirage of a world beyond the fences. The hospital is a hollow façade, the clinic might be Doctor Moreau's House of Pain. "Extermination must be productive," says Himmler. "No image, no description can capture the true dimension," but Alain Resnais can still confront and remember—his restless lens ponders the scratch marks on the gas chamber's ceiling, then peers into a rusted oven as if gazing inside an exhausted Moloch's maw. Mountains of hair and bowls of decapitated heads, the byword at Nuremberg ("je ne suis pas responsible"). The greatest of Resnais' shorts, a haunted litany on unspeakable events barely a decade old, the madness of history and the sin of forgetfulness. Cinematography by Sacha Vierny and Ghislain Cloquet.
--- Fernando F. Croce |