Following the 40th anniversary of the premiere of Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary, Shoah, the Jerusalem Cinematheque is featuring a tribute to the filmmaker and his work from January 14-29.
Shoah will be screened in two parts on different evenings. I saw it for a second time last year at the Berlin International Film Festival, and its impact has not dimmed a bit since its release. If anything, it has sharpened with time, and the emphasis on the words of those who lived through the Holocaust made their testimonies more vivid than any archival footage could have.
When we view piles of dead bodies and skeletal survivors, we tend to perceive those people as statistics. But as each interviewee in Shoah opens up in his or her unique way for Lanzmann’s questions and his camera, their humanity floods the screen, making the tragedy of what they went through more disturbing.
What you will remember from the film most intensely are the people, among them Simon Srebnik, one of two survivors of the Chelmno extermination camp, where 400,000 Jews were murdered, and where gas vans were first used. Srebnik was forced to sing popular songs to entertain the Germans; Abraham Bomba, a barber who was filmed cutting a man’s hair in a Tel Aviv barber shop, recounted how he had to cut women’s hair in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp.
No less memorable are the voices of local Poles, who knew exactly what was going on, and in some cases, drove the trains that carried Jews to their deaths, and the Nazis who remember every aspect of operating the killing machine.
Lanzmann’s "Shoah" to be screened in Jerusalem
Lanzmann’s genius was to understand that the details were the story, that in the deepest sense, it was impossible to memorialize the Holocaust without knowing exactly what happened. As the movie progresses, the scale of the carnage becomes more vivid and more horrifying.
All I had Was Nothingness, by Guillame Ribot, is a new documentary that is an essential companion piece to Shoah, and shows Lanzmann’s battle to make the film. Filmed in a similarly naturalistic style as the original documentary, Ribot uses Lanzmann’s own words, from his audio recordings and his journals (which are read by Ribot himself), to chronicle Shoah’s 12-year journey to the screen, as well as outtakes from the film.
It’s a kind of road movie that follows Lanzmann through many journeys: in Germany, Poland, Israel, and the US. “Making Shoah was a long and difficult battle,” Lanzmann says. “I wanted to film, but all I had was nothingness. The subject of Shoah is death itself... On some evenings, it seemed like senseless suffering, and I was ready to give up. But during those 12 years of work, I always forced myself to stare relentlessly into the black sun of the Holocaust.”
Realizing that the subject of the film would be “death itself and not survival,” he probed the memories of his interviewees. But his emphasis on the details of the horrors did not sit well, apparently, with the Israeli officials who first commissioned the film, nor with American Jewish organizations.
“Not one American dollar funded Shoah,” he recalled, noting that if the film’s message had been, “Never again, or love one another,” he might have had an easier time getting it financed. “I was a lousy fundraiser,” he commented.
At the end of this moving film, Lanzmann says: “I’ve always been haunted by all those people who died alone, abandoned by everyone. I wanted to make this film to resurrect them, and kill them a second time, so that we could die with them, and they wouldn’t die alone.”
Lanzmann certainly achieved that, bringing us as close as humanly possible to the victims in their last moments in Shoah. Ribot’s film shows us how he managed this feat.
There are two other Lanzmann films about the Holocaust included in the tribute. A Visitor from the Living is a 1979 interview with Maurice Rossel, a Red Cross delegate in wartime Berlin, who sits in his Swiss home and denies his role in the Nazis’ staged deception, and The Karski Report, a 1978 interview with Jan Karski, a Polish courier who warned the West about the Nazis’ extermination plans.
Two films about Israel are also part of the tribute. The most interesting of these is Lanzmann’s Israel, Why?, a 1973 film that presents a panorama of Israelis and Israeli life between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Tsahal, a 1994 look at the Israeli military, is a rare misfire for Lanzmann. It runs over five hours and should have been edited better. The interviews ramble, and each point is made over and over.