Viewing memory through Night and Fog, The Sorrow and the Pity and Shoah

Abstract

Between 1955 and 1983, three French film documentaries displaced our understanding of the events of World War II: Nuit et brouillard by Alain Resnais, Le Chagrin et la pitié by Marcel Ophuls and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. These are films that reveal specific moments in France’s difficult path to assessing the events of the ‘dark years’. As markers of changes in the political, social and cultural attitude of France’s views of the war and Vichy, these films offer probing historical evidence of France’s struggles with its past, as well as compelling archival materials on the deportations, the occupation and the Holocaust. But, in addition, they also present us with exceptional illustrations of the vicissitudes of recollections, the unpredictable workings of memory, and the vicarious effects of visual and oral testimonies. They in turn testify to a contemporary cultural event: the displacement of traditional history in favour of testimony.