Literature and cinema: Night and fog and Hiroshima mon amour

Abstract

In Night and fog (1955) and Hiroshima mon amour (1958), the director, Alain Resnais, with scripts by Jean Cayrol and Marguerite Duras, respectively, confronts the viewer with images touching the real. In the first production, huge barns are shown where human beings are reduced, with an extreme sense of order –for the sake of hygiene and maintaining a strict hierarchy−, to the status of a piece or thing. They are stripped naked, forced to shave their heads, their skin is branded and their names are replaced with numbers... It is the unimaginable of terror turned into a daily occurrence in that «new modern planet» as Cayrol warns. In the second film, the images also touch the real and burn: with desire in spite of destruction, with pain shaking sanity and with memory/oblivion and its vocation of survival. This paper aims to highlight the critical power, that is, the scorching and enduring knowledge attained by the poetic, literary and film image before the real of annihilation.

Keywords

• film making
• literature
• resnais
• duras
• cayrol
• concentration camps
• world war ii