Haneke and the Camps

In his famous 1992 article on Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1959 film Kapo about the concentration camps, the French art and film critic Serge Daney criticizes Pontecorvo’s aestheticization of death in a particular tracking shot in the film. Despite admitting to never having himself seen Kapo, Daney is inspired to write about it because of an earlier condemnation of the film by the director Jacques Rivette in a brief article published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1961 entitled ‘De l’abjection’ (‘On Abjection’). ¹ Daney takes up Rivette’s critique by suggesting that the tracking shot, which ends up with a close-up image of the actress Emmanuelle Riva electrified on the barbed wire of the camp, was a step too far for ‘inconsiderately abolishing a distance [Pontecorvo] should have “kept”. The tracking shot was immoral for the simple reason that it was putting us — him filmmaker and me spectator — in a place where we did not belong’. ² As a counter to this ‘step too far’, Daney, like Rivette, posits Alain Resnais’s film about the camps Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), which appeared four years before Pontecorvo’s film, in 1955. According to Daney, the major difference between Resnais’s treatment of the image and that of Pontecorvo is that Resnais puts a ‘stop’ on the image and, in that crucial moment, avoids the aestheticization of horror, thus respecting Adorno’s injunction about art after Auschwitz. In Rivette’s words, Kapo allows us to become ‘accustomed to the horror, which little by little is accepted by morality, and will quickly become part of the mental landscape of modern man’, yet ‘you cannot accustom yourself to Night and Fog’. ³