The Film Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The Film - Essay Example Adopting a light-hearted tone, Marker takes the unique approach of editing various video clips together, without adhering to time frame, and putting them together to describe the memories of the fictional Sandor Krasna, whose letters are read by a female narrator whose identity we never find out. Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard, on the other hand, is based on the very real and macabre events of Holocaust. With most of the focus on the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, the documentary which was filmed ten years after the Holocaust ended (1955), lays bare the atrocities committed therein. The male narrator simply relates the series of events that start from the rounding up of the people who were being sent to the concentration camps. The tone of the movie is, of course, very somber and serious throughout. In his movie, Chris Marker tries to explore how human memory works and how time and place have an effect on everything that later becomes history. It is an attempt on his part to take an interest in the banalities of life and, through them, try to explain human nature. The tone of the movie remains quite philosophical; though a lot of people are put off by it and they claim that Marker has ruined what could have otherwise been a great travelogue by using this tone, I disagree. The script of the movie, which are the letters read by the narrator, is crisp, innovative and it helps in driving the point home: the subjectivity of human memory and how we perceive time. It is a very unique approach and I agree that it is not palatable to everyone; however, it is unfair on the part of the critics to call it a work of pseudo-intellectualism. In Nuit et Brouillard, the script is very objective and it portrays the suffering of the prisoners of concentration camps in Nazi Germany. There are no personal observations made by the narrator; he recounts the events as and when