Directed by: Claude Lanzmann.
Written by: Claude Lanzmann.
So much
has already been written about Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah that it can be
intimidating for a first time viewer to actually sit down and watch the film.
The first thing you hear about the film is its length – 566 minutes, or
approximately nine and half hours. It’s meant to be watched all in one sitting,
or perhaps two – as Lanzmann does break the film into two different “eras” –
although watching one four and a half hour long movie followed by a five hour
movie the next day is just as intimidating. The next thing you hear about the
film is that Lanzmann uses no archival footage at all – that he switches
between so called “talking head” sequences with survivors, witnesses and the
Nazis themselves – and shots of the locations as they were when Lanzmann shot
the movie in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It should be clear to anyone who
has read anything about Shoah that it is not a typical Holocaust documentary –
it’s not a typical documentary at all. In many ways the film is a one off in
cinema history. You’ve never quite seen anything like it.
What
becomes clear early on in Shoah is that Lanzmann is not going to ask anyone any
of the “big questions”. He’s not going to ask “why” it happened – what made
Hitler and the Nazis decide to exterminate 6 million Jews – alongside other
“undesirables” (who Lanzmann doesn’t really mention in the film). Hitler and
the top ranked Nazis are actually barely mentioned in the movie at all. You
would think that a movie that is as long as Shoah would detail everything that
happened – and walk you through step-by-step the major turning points. But
that’s not really what Lanzmann is interested in doing – and besides, you can
get that information from any number of other sources. Instead what Lanzmann is
interested in is the memories of those who were there – those who suffered,
those who witnessed their suffering and those responsible for their suffering.
His camera rarely moves during the interviews he conducts – and they often stay
on the face of his subject for extended periods of time – 10 minute shots are
greater are not uncommon. What he is most interested in is what happened on a
micro level, not on a macro level.
For
instance, he interviews a barber – who is still cutting hair in Israel – whose
job at one of the camps was to cut off the hair of those who were about to go
to their death in the gas chambers. How many other barbers worked alongside
him? What was the setup like? What did he use to cut their hair? Were their
mirrors? How long did he take to cut one person’s hair? What was the style he
cut it into? What did they do with the hair? Lanzmann is not on camera much in
Shoah, but his voice is persistent. He pushes and pushes and pushes everyone he
talks to for more details. When they breakdown, as they often do, and ask him
to stop he doesn’t. He keeps pushing, he keeps his camera trained on them as
they go quiet, or start to cry. They cannot go on. They must, Lanzmann tells
him. Some complain that he is cruel – and he is at times – but he knows how
important the interviews are not just to him and his film, but also to the
individuals. They haven’t talked about this for decades. It’s important to get
it out.
Lanzmann
does this over and over again – training his camera on his subjects and not
letting them go. He gets a wealth of information from a few of the Nazis who
helped run the death camps. These were shot on a hidden camera, in grainy black
and white, and the Nazis ask for assurances that their conversation will be
kept confidential. “Of course”, Lanzmann responds, boldly lying. Again with
these men he isn’t asking the large questions, but the smaller ones. How long
did it take to “process” one train car full of victims? The entire train? How
did they manage to keep these people under control? What order did they go in?
Why that order? And on and on and on. He spends a lot of time in Poland, asking
the residents what they saw and how they feel about the Jews. Do they miss
them? There is not a lot of introspection on their part. He has interviews with
some of the Germans who were in charge of running the trains? Did they know
what was on those trains? Of course not, they say. They were so busy they never
left their desks. One train was just like all the rest. But when he examines
the train documents with an historian, he wonders why none of the people in
charge ever wondered why they were scheduling full trains to arrive and empty
trains to depart later that same day go somewhere else, fill up again, and
return to the same location?
Because
of the way the film is made, it has the feeling of memory – as both the people
and the places they are talking about are somewhat out of time. The men and
women are talking about events 35 years ago, and the locations Lanzmann is
shooting – the death camps, the Polish cities, the ghetto, etc. – have also
changed. They are different, and yet haunted by their past. When Lanzmann’s
camera is not trained on his interview subjects, it is attached to the trains
for minutes on end – sometimes with the interviews heard on the soundtrack, sometimes
not – or slow and steady tracking shots along the grounds of the areas they are
talking about. The shots are haunting – beautiful and sad at the same time.
The
movie needs to be as long as Lanzmann has made it for it to have the effect he
desires. This is not an issue of a filmmaker not knowing what needing to be cut
and including everything – he has already made four other documentaries out of
the interviews he shot while making Shoah that didn’t fit in to this movie
(I’ve seen three of them, all great, but Lanzmann made the correct decision not
to include them in this film, as they really do not fit). The film is about the
accumulation of small details, the memories of everyone involved the merging of
past and present. He takes an unfathomably large subject and concentrates on
the small details, illuminating the whole in a distinct way. This would not be
the film to watch if you were some sort of alien creature who had never heard
of the Holocaust at all – it assumes some knowledge on the part of the
audience. But Lanzmann is interested in specific parts of the Holocaust – not
the exact events, but how it happened to individuals instead of how it happened
to 6 million people. More than any other film I have ever seen about the
Holocaust, Shoah gives us the details that allows you to get closer than ever
before to what it was liked to be lined up heading into the gas chambers to be
killed. Between the words of those being interviews, and the landscapes
Lanzmann captures, he creates images that only exist in the mind’s eye. Like in
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona where many people think that Bergman actually shot
Bibi Andersson’s sex scene, when really she just described it, or in the shower
scene in Psycho, where many think they saw a lot more than they actually did,
Lanzmann achieves the same thing in Shoah. The effect is powerful, disturbing,
haunting and unforgettable.
I
haven’t talk about many of the details in Shoah – the individuals interviews
themselves or the details they uncover in the movie. If I did, then I’d be here
all day writing, and you’d be here all day reading. Those details matter – but
it’s up to the viewer to find them. I don’t often urge viewers to see a
particular movie – I feel my reviews should give the reader an idea as to
whether or not they’ll enjoy a particular movie or not, and leave it at that.
But I do urge everyone to see Shoah. I put off seeing the film for at least a
decade, not wanting to subject myself to what I thought would be a thoroughly
depressing experience. But Shoah, while offering a fairly bleak portrait of
humanity, is not that. It is something altogether different and unique in
cinema history. A masterpiece in every sense of the word.
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