effective distancing

Demarcus 2022-03-23 09:02:48

"Night and Fog", Alain Resnais, the representative of the French New Wave, was shot in 1955, ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

Varda, the mother of the new wave, said: The effect of alienation is very effectively used, and the feelings are purified with reason and distance. This is called gaining passion through a structure that does not pursue sentimentality.

Before watching it, I thought I was mentally prepared. Facing the piles of deformed skeletons, the stripped human body, and the mountains of women's hair, heads, and soap made from human bodies, my heart was still intense. Shocked! Absolute restraint, not provoking the audience's emotions with a sensational tone, but carefully handling every detail, leading the audience into the channel of thinking about the theme of "memory and forgetting".

When these images are in the past, we pretend that this will only happen at a certain time and place, and pretend to face the sun of tomorrow with hope again!

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Extended Reading
  • Rosanna 2022-04-21 09:03:01

    A return and questioning that is doomed to be fruitless since the beginning of the day, the insurmountable gap between the archives and the truth is more profoundly revealed by the stacking of numerous visual evidences. Compared with the images that are still dripping with blood even though they are engraved on black and white film, what is even more reflective is the "normalization" and standardization of the design and operation of the concentration camp by the Nazis - the concentration camp as a large prison pretends to be a normal one to cover up its essence. The city even designed a "prison" in its planning - the purpose of the existence of the prison in the prison is to make the real prison no longer regarded as a prison. This illusion not only acts on outsiders and bystanders, but also points to the interior of the concentration camp the staff themselves.

  • Cale 2022-04-22 07:01:45

    We are deaf to the pain of human nature's never-ending suffering. We pretend to believe that such a tragedy will only happen once at a certain time.

Night and Fog quotes

  • Récitant/Narrator: 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 happened all at 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.

  • Récitant/Narrator: 1933 - The machine gets under way. The nation must all sing the same song, with no wrong notes.