Shoah

It's nine and a half hours of travelogue footage and interviews with terribly ordinary middle-aged and senior citizens about events that happened a half-century ago.

Except that the sites visited are the scenes of the systematic mass murder of roughly 11 million men, women and children, including some 6 million Jews, and the ordinary grandparents are the survivors and perpetrators of some of the most horrendous atrocities that mankind has committed upon each other.

It is a terribly draining movie, hypnotic and disorienting, both in it's length and in the blandness, the matter-of-fact descriptions of things that would make a normal person scream in horror. And that is what is so amazingly important and meaningful about this film; that these were ordinary, average people. These were, and are, normal folks like you and me, and anybody, regardless of background, moral upbringing, and standards of decency can be caught up in circumstances beyond their power or experience, and can do the most depraved or heroic things imaginable. It is shocking, insightful, and a very,very important film that forces us to confront our own humanity and decide what that, in fact means.

But it's nine and a half hours long. Be prepared to be drained and leave with your head buzzing.

Incredible documentary with first-person testimonies, slowly and calmly, to listen, meditate and observe the worst of human nature, the wolf that justifies itself, the guilt that evades, the hidden, justified hatred and resentment, the evasion in the looks, the slow and stammering responses, the laughter of certain witnesses, the human being can really be a demon, and then continue living as if nothing had happened. Education in hatred of the neighbor, of the brother, we see where it can go, and here, unfortunately, history repeats itself, we continue to incite hatred for mere economic interests, disguised as culture, nationalities, races and religions...

I've been learning about the Holocaust for at least twenty years now. I've attended at least two talks that were given by survivors. I've read memoirs and short stories and graphic novels and history books, seen fictionalized films and documentaries, and been to at least two Holocaust museums, including the one in DC.

Yet it wasn't until watching this film that it truly dawned on me: the Holocaust took place in this exact world that we're living in now. It took place in a world where people wear Hawaiian shirts, where children walk alongside their bicycles, where people pay to get haircuts. It took place in a world with railroads and travel agencies and moving vans and typewriters. It took place in a world with farmers and bureaucrats and engineers and babies. A world where people complain about their jobs, where people are too tired or selfish or stupid or scared to care about anything other than themselves. The trees looked like trees then, the rivers flowed like rivers, and the grass was green in the summertime. All of this happened, not in some otherworldly, black-and-white, unfathomable realm, but in a world where children under four can ride a train for free, where not having a flush toilet in your house could be considered appallingly primitive, and where a living person exposed to exhaust fumes will suffocate and a body exposed to flame will turn to ash.

Lanzmann's interviews are intense. His personality, albeit quite calm and always polite, is stirringly insistent--he never hesitates to call a lie a lie, even as he encounters every possible variety of mistruth. There are those who try to rewrite the past--to claim ignorance, poor memory, a lack of any actionable authority, a rosier and more melodramatic view of a tragic fate that was simply unavoidable. What could we have done, they say. We didn't know, they say. We did everything we could, they say. Even if we had risked our necks, it was fated from up above. He never lets that pass. "No. I don't think that's true," he says, and their faces falter, all shrugs and awkward smiles and apologetic platitudes, because of course it's not true.

The Holocaust unfolded because everybody kept doing what they were supposed to be doing, too overwhelmed or uncaring to choose resistance. It was an unprecedented and horrifying event, yet it unfolded in the temperament, landscape, and conditions of this very normal world. Hopefully, Lanzmann's courage will encourage viewers to speak up whenever they have an opportunity to challenge wrongness.

Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour Holocaust documentary is difficult, painful, and, above all else, exhausting – both emotionally and physically. I watched this goliath over four nights, and I pretty much had to force myself into every viewing, knowingly condemning myself to two hours of misery. But I wouldn't trade the experience. There are movies, and then there are... well, there are no words for what this is.

Lanzmann spent six years tracking down and interviewing Jewish survivors, German commanders, and Polish eye-witnesses, reconstructing through oral testimonies – without even a second of archival footage – the horror of the Nazi death camps. The dialogue, often interminably filtered through an interpreter and then translated from French via subtitles, is overlaid on footage of the death camps as they stand now (that is, in the 1970s/80s), as innocuous ruins or grassy fields. Thus, Lanzmann juxtaposes the atrocities described in his interviews with the quietude of the modern-day locations, acknowledging from the outset the impossibility of ever fully recreating or appreciating the horrors that took place.

Throughout the film, we mostly perceive Lanzmann as an off-camera interviewer, but he nevertheless takes a very active role in the film's presentation. We note his determination to assemble a historical record at all costs: he includes footage of himself assuring Franz Suchomel, a former SS officer, that the interview is not being filmed. (Many alleged perpetrators are seen only through a grainy black-and-white hidden camera, a device that keeps them emotionally distant from the viewer, as in a 1940s newsreel). Lanzmann rather sardonically asks his interpreter to complement a German couple on their beautiful home, knowing full well that it once belonged to a Jewish family.

The interviews with Jewish survivors are most haunting of all. Lanzmann doesn't ask them to communicate their emotions, but instead needles them for details, seemingly inconsequential observations that nevertheless improve our understanding of how the Final Solution operated. But he also knows when to keep quiet. The silent anguish evident on the survivors' old, scarred faces is often more powerful than words could ever be. One survivor of the Warsaw Uprising remarks to Lanzmann, "if you could lick my heart, it would poison you." We can see this even in his face.

I did not love every second of Shoah. I didn't even love every hour. But, I think this was intentional. While yes, I didn't quite give this a perfect score, I can completely understand why people have. It hasn't left my mind in the days since I watched it, and there is nothing else out there like it. I think the reason why we don't see many big documentaries on The Holocaust anymore is because Shoah covered so much, and is such a difficult movie to follow up. Between it and Schindler's List (which is obviously not a documentary, but deals with similar subject matter in a lengthy, gruelling, but admittedly more accessible manner), films about The Holocaust have likely peaked. Then again, I guess Son Of Saul provided a fresh and uniquely haunting depiction of The Holocaust, so maybe my point doesn't entirely stand.

WELL: when it comes to documentaries, it's difficult to imagine another one on The Holocaust being as comprehensive, gut-wrenching, and ambitious as Shoah. Plus the fact that in 1985, there were still more survivors and eyewitness accounts to draw from helped. Despite the lack of archival footage and images, this film is incredibly gruesome and horrific, as many of the stories alone provide an intense and overwhelming amount of detail. Lanzmann was a real tough interviewer throughout, and was completely unafraid to ask difficult question to all his interviewees, whether they were victims, perpetrators, or bystanders. It's uncomfortable, perhaps, but the interrogating style of interviews does get more detail, emotion, and brutal honesty than you would get from more formal interviews. Also perhaps controversial was the filming of ex-Nazis, who agreed to have their voices recorded but not their faces. Lanzmann used hidden cameras for these interviews, and usually that kind of deception would turn me off a documentary, but the argument here that they got off too easily for their crimes and therefore deserve to be exposed is a compelling and rather agreeable one.

It's hard to cover too much about this movie. The experience of watching it is really necessary, because putting something this huge into words is futile, unless you want to go on for pages and pages. But I would like to address two prominent criticisms of this film, and explain why they didn't bother me too much, while briefly going over what I didn't expect to get out of the film but did.

The first criticism is regarding how some interviews aren't translated efficiently, with Lanzmann asking a question (which is subtitled), his translator repeating the question in the interviewee's language, the interviewee answering, and then the translator putting their answer back into French (I think? The language that Lanzmann was speaking), which is then subtitled. The way some viewers complained about this, I was worried every interview was going to be translated this way, but in the end, it was maybe about a quarter? Maybe even less. And even then, it wasn't that bothersome. Tightening up the editing might take half an hour to an hour off the runtime, but the way these interviews are filmed, there would be so many jump cuts, and I think it would just feel weird.

The other criticism is the length in general. That almost nine and a half hours is too long. This is one that I understand, and yes, the length was challenging. The last two to three hours, I'll admit, I found it harder to concentrate. But, I think this was intentional, and even though it leads to a less "entertaining" film, I think it elicits a powerful and unique emotional response. By making the film so long (and occasionally repetitive), Lanzmann is effectively making us used to the horrors he covers in such explicit detail. Many of the interviewees talk about how they were nauseated and disgusted by what was happening in the concentration camps, but after a while, became desensitised and numb to it all. The man who had to remove the bodies from the gas chambers threw up the first time he had to do it, but after some time, he became used to it. The townspeople who lived near concentration camps were horrified at first- by the smells, the sights, and the knowledge of what was happening so close by- but also, eventually, got numb to it. Unless you were there, it's hard to imagine how something so horrifying could become so "normal." But watching a documentary as horrific and detailed and long as Shoah replicates that feeling. Once I realised I was no longer as horrified or saddened by the stories in the final hours as I had been in the first few hours, I finally had some semblance of an understanding why those who lived during that time became apathetic. It's a haunting and sobering thought, realising that in all likelihood, I, my friends, my family- had all of us been in the same situation, it may have been similarly easy to accept such horrors.

Therefore, Shoah, above all else, reads to me as a warning to not become desensitised. To not stop caring when terrible things happen, because not doing anything can let the genuinely evil people get away with so much more. Of course, Shoah achieves far more than just this in its gargantuan runtime, but this was my main take away. I'd highly recommend Shoah, despite its challenging nature and overall length, because if you give it time, it can likely change your outlook on life, and better you as a human being.