CONTRADICTION .. night and fog

“We can be more experimental with documentaries than I can be with narrative films. The kind of films that end up in movie houses and malls and award ceremonies, those kinds of narrative films - they're a very conventional form. The structure is conventional, what people want to see is conventional; the kinds of things that are allowed, the kinds of relationships between the different elements are conventional. That's not true for documentary; it's much more open ended.”

-Philip Glass, SoundTrackNet

Hanns Eisler's score for Night and Fog is a great example of the use of contradictory music in film. Contradiction between what the audience expects to feel when presented with an image, and the feeling it associates with the music, is especially effective in encouraging the audience to think about what they are seeing. Using a simple orchestra, Eisler's music meets with footage of then- present-day concentration camp conditions (10 years after the war), either softly and peacefully, or harshly and modern. It comments on the indifference and ignorance many people had of the horrors of the holocaust; 'are we really to blame?' The modern, atonal, emotionless elements, the tinkering pizzicato, express the idea of the cold, efficient, Nazi machine –murder by bureaucracy.

“The rap against most Holocaust films is that they exploit the audience’s feelings of outrage and sorrow for commercial ends; and, by pretending to put us vicariously through such a staggeringly incomprehensible experience, they trivialize, reducing it to sentimental melodrama. Alain Resnais has done nothing of the kind...

“This effort at analysis and reflection is one of the ways the filmmakers work to evade pious sentimentality: indeed, the voiceover narration (masterfully spoken by Michel Bouquet) is delivered in a harsh, dry, astringent tone, filled with ironic shadings (though, according to the filmmaker himself, he asked Bouquet to deliver his lines in a “neutral tone”). The magnificent score by Hanns Eisler is also employed ironically: the lovely, lyrical flute passages collide with harrowing images, the Schoenbergian pizzicato strings signal the revving up of the Nazi machine. (Just as Cayrol’s text is unusually elegant, dense, and poetic for a film voiceover, so the Eisler score is not your typical movie background music, but a modern composition that has since been performed in concert halls.)”

-Philip Lopate, Criterion

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composer: Hanns Eisler
..
.. collaborated extensively with Bertolt Brecht
.. academy award for Hangmen Also Die! (Fritz Lang)
..

directed by Alain Resnais

links:

Phillip Lopate Review
Night and Fog on YouTube

INTRO

CLASSIC
.. silent films
.. sin city
.. brazil

CONTRADICTION
.. night and fog

EVENT
.. akira

CHARACTER
.. blade runner

THE ADDED DIMENSION
.. a clockwork orange

links / references