Resnais excavates the ruins of a deathhouse no different from how an archaeologist unearths a sacred/unholy burial site from time immemorial (yet in actuality from history so recent as to startle us from our 'dogmatic slumber'). Temporal dichotomies (typical of Resnais' brand of thought) surface: the pain & misery of the past vs the feeble obliviousness of the present / the winter of discontent vs the spring of blind optimism / black & white 'truth' vs color 'exposition' / photographic evidence of torture, starvation, dehumanized bodies and death vs cinematic footage of serene fields replenished with fresh green grass and the mouldy empty hulks of unobstrusive nondescript buildings that were once chambers described by corpses and galleries stinking of dysentery / nonfiction (documentary) v fiction (cinema) / history (World War II) vs memory (the Holocaust, the concentration camp)...
In Resnais' analysis, the concentration camp emerges as an enclosed, selfsustained yet barbarous polity ordered absurdly by laws and customs of its own; the 'final solution' results from a rabid mechanization patterned by logical concerns for efficiency, industry, and architecture: the monstrosity at play turns out to be a consequence of diachronic monomania, the extreme suffering of a nameless multitude set to the utilitarian rhythmless rhythm of a pendulum, put in motion by a demonic bodiless rationality. Where no one person was in charge, logic's evil curse administered the mandates of labor, of lifeless life and of vivid mechanical death. Night descends on the fog of memory...
...
Nuit
et brouillard.
Night &
fog.
Margarete or
Shulamith (gold-ore-coal)
to shine
away the veined
memento
of earthly summers
past, a poppy
in my
beloved's hair.
Blue eye & black
tongue lapping stolen milk
at daybreak, in the fog
that makes of day
a nighttide.
Howl of the hollowedout
bowl, hunger
of the severed
heads in scent
amphorae
eyehole
spoonedout
& sucked thru the curve
of a pale crescent
skull, counted
among the bitter thoughts
that even starving
men can't
ingest.
Sarcophagus in the aire of time
raising ashflakes the wind
raining Shulamith's coal hair
& comely, black lonely
mounds of hair
(headless)
hills of hair
(measureless)
mountains of hair.
'Poppies
& memory.'
It is time that they knew
it was time, it is
Shulamith's hair
coaldust
strewn on Margarete's
gildcrest
poppyfield
fog encroaching
on dawn's
milkwhitecheek
a fugue of time rushing back-
ward
to a winedark
shell, time rushing back-
ward
a fugitive un-
shelled
from a sleep of milkfilled bowls
the black &
blue
of my beloved's wrist
holding up a bowl
to drink
her breath
the poppy breath
her eyes
the fog that rushes back-
ward
toward goldendays stolen
by night.
(I do
remember
our sarcophagus
so bitterly
in aire.)
...
Cf.
http://books.google.com/books?id=8GQBPcfBhPMC&dq=Paul+Celan&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=XUHrSfu9N9ngtgfb4ujFBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6
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