A Montage of Surviving Images: Deportation Footage in Varsovie, quand même … (1954) and Night and Fog (1956)

Abstract

A Montage of Surviving Images:Deportation Footage in Varsovie, quand même … (1954) and Night and Fog (1956) Matilda Mroz (bio) and Ivan Cerecina (bio) In the early months of 1956, French director Alain Resnais completed work on Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog (FR), his now classic meditation on the concentration camps and their afterlife. The film struck audiences then, as it does now, with its mix of brightly rendered Eastmancolor footage of the remains of camps with archival footage and photographs from all around Europe depicting deportations to, and the machinery of, the camp system. While historians of post-war French cinema often hold up Resnais's film as the first concerted effort to make a film about the camps, it was not the first film to make use of this burgeoning archive of visual materials. Two years earlier, Yannick Bellon—Resnais's erstwhile film school classmate and collaborator—made Varsovie, quand même …/Warsaw Remains … (FR, 1954; henceforth Varsovie), a short documentary on the fate of Warsaw during WWII, in which we see several of the same archival images of deportations that appear in Resnais's film. Bellon's film, as well as others by the Polish director Kurt Weber (Pod Jednym Niebem/Under the Same Sky, PL, 1955) and the American Leo Hurwitz (The Museum and the Fury, US, 1956), point towards a complex set of competing historical and political discourses beginning to form around these images in mid-century archival documentaries. This article tracks the re-deployment of these images taken in and around occupied Warsaw, focusing on the shifting political discourses on the deportation to the camps, the Nazi project of racial annihilation, and the fate of Warsaw's citizens during WWII, in Night and Fog and Varsovie. In examining the migration of archival images between films contemporaneously released, this piece is interested in processes of re-assemblage, or what [End Page 103] art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has termed "re-montage." At base in Didi-Huberman's use of this term is a play on words: the French remonter means not only to "re-assemble" something but also to "re-surface" (say, from a body of water) or to rewind back in time. In their deployment of Nazi perpetrator footage, Night and Fog and Varsovie enact their own processes of re-montage, re-surfacing these images from wartime in a way that encourages us to pose questions about their "cultural survival."1 The visual treatment sections of this piece closely examine and compare the shared use of images and differences in voice-over across these films. By re-cutting these voices and images, our piece creates its own re-montage: we extract images from their wider placement within a film, consider their collisions with images from other films, and seek to place them back within their contexts with a renewed understanding of history as a "palimpsest" of views that shift and change over time.2 If, for Didi-Huberman, re-surfaced archival material has the potential to erupt into previous ways of conceptualizing history, to form a "breach in the history conceived," our collaborative written and audiovisual work seeks to create a further breach in the archive of images that are found in the films under discussion, by our process of extraction and re-mixing of repeated images.3 Following Didi-Huberman, we consider how archival images, in their movements across and between films, can be thought of as "surviving" or "returning" images, or "phantoms."4 The full extent and significance of the images that are shared between Night and Fog and Varsovie require a lengthier survey than we can conduct here; in the written section of this paper, we have chosen, instead, to focus on the circulation of one particular image, which we have termed Image X. A snippet of perpetrator footage showing columns of deportees on a Warsaw street, Image X makes visible the suffering of an anonymized collective, retaining an emblematic quality that has allowed it to play different roles in different filmic contexts. Hence our use of the signifier "x": something is marked out and made visible in this image, but "x" also crosses out, veils, or covers over...