English Film Essay

2.

Nietzsche and the Use of History in Night And Fog and The Maelstrom



The reconstruction of history in film is particularly vulnerable to Nietzsche's criticism of historical culture. Films about the past can slide easily into historical narratives, dictating for us what we ought to feel in a given context rather than forcing us to process an event on our own terms. In "The Useand Abuse of History" Friedrich Nietzsche argues that "historical culture" has turned the modern man into a cog, resigned to fit neatly into his preordained place in the scientific unfolding of things. History, Nietzsche argues, strips life of creativity— "If each success has come by "rational necessity" and every event shows the victory of logic... then down on you knees quickly, and let everystep in the ladder of success have its reverence!" (Nietzsche 52). If we learn only to see "logically" – in relation to a culture of deductive logic, grounded in selective observation of the past— we learn only to interpret, and we forget how to create. We feel as though we are part of a pattern, be it Hegel's or Marx's, and we become blind to our own intrinsic needs as people. It is in this way,Nietzsche argues, that history is abused. Every society needs history, but an excess of it suffocates us— we lose the ability to "feel and act unhistorically" (64), that is, we lose the ability to see ourselves outside of our proximity to a past or a future. In a film this might translate to an inablity to understand an event, scene, or character independent of its historical context. And yet, justas some history is needed in order for a society to function, it is possible for a film not only to abuse history but to use it in order to inspire action and creation. It is through this deliberate utilization of history that filmmakers Alain Resnais and Peter Forgac use the past to serve the present.
In Night And Fog (1955), a film commissioned by the French government to commemorate theHolocaust, Resnais promotes a moral agenda without any of the historical abuse Nietzsche would have rebuked. He does this by avoiding didactic narrative and choosing instead to, in the words of Nietzsche, "present the past only by what is most powerful in the present" (Nietzsche 40). Night and Fog is certainly an indictment, but it galvanizes not by addressing our historical logic but by addressing ourinstincts. In Emma Wilson's essay, "Material Remains: Night and Fog," Wilson emphasizes Resnais' use of "haptic images" to "remind us heavily of the untouchability and intractibility of this traumatic past" (Wilson 110). Instead of attempting to recreate the Holocaust for us, a clear impossibility, Resnais evokes in us universal, immanent reactions that "refer to [the] calamity but in no wayrepresent it" (97). For example, after a series of still photographs of deportations, Resnais cuts to documentary footage of figures walking, fulfilling our "painful wish to see these figures as animate, as living and moving" (98). Here, Resnais addresses us as sentient beings independent of historical culture and in doing this provides us with a constructive lens through which to see an event of thepast. This is the positive utilization of history that Nietzsche writes of. "If there is no constructive impulse behind the historical... if justice alone be supreme, the creative instinct is sapped and discouraged" (Nietzsche 42). By depicting the Holocaust in haptic, non-narrative form, Resnais uses history to inspire rather than categorize.
Peter Forgac's The Maelstrom (1997) works to thesame end— instead of inserting itself into a traditional historical discourse, it provides us with a new perspective from which to see our own perception. It is a film constructed entirely from home videos; most of the videos belonged to the Peerebooms, a Jewish Dutch family in the 1940's, but there are some also from Nazi families. Stripped of history, The Maelstrom is a movie about the...