Sylvie Lindeperg, Jean-Louis Comolli
2009 - France - Couleur - 109'
In 2007, Sylvie Lindeperg published Night and Fog: a film in history (Editions Odile Jacob), the result of a long reflection on the film by Alain Resnais. Gérald Collas asked me to make a film based on the book. I had known and appreciated Sylvie Lindeperg and her work for years. The idea of filming her in action (as I had previously filmed the architect Pierre Riboulet, the chef Alain Ducasse, the musician Michel Portal or the historian Carlo Ginzburg) immediately appealed to me.
In this film, as in her book, but this time through images and sounds, Sylvie Lindeperg questions the complex influences that led to the making of Night and Fog and which weighed on its destiny. With her, artistic practice, and this film in particular, are seen as means to analyse the contradictions of an era. But in no way is the film a “reconstitution”. We wanted to make actual the gesture and ways of seeing specific to historians. To film them here and now. The archive images of concentration camps and death camps reused in Night and Fog always raise questions concerning their legitimacy, the suffering they bear, the challenge they present to our desires as well as our possibilities of seeing. When it comes to the destruction of European Jews, these are burning questions.
Jean-Louis Comolli
Photography : Michel Bort
Sound : Francisco Camino
Editing : Ginette Lavigne
Production : INA