Shoah

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.

This documentary tells the story of the Holocaust from a particularly human and "everyman" viewpoint. Claude Lanzmann realized that the victims of this horror were gradually dying off and took the initiative to search out the innocents who had these hidious tattoos on their arms and just talk to them. Not all wanted to be a part of the picture, but Lanzmann had a very unique ability to coax and sometimes browbeat the experiences out of these ordinary people who were subjected to unspeakable horrors. This is a long and extremely painful film to watch. Make no mistake. At the end is a better understanding of man's capacity for cruelty to his fellow man. I believe that is what Lanzmann wanted to pass down to the coming generations.

With commenting this film we are going out of the movie industry to get into history and the world that it shaped. This rating concerns the importance of the theme of the movie and the effort and the enormous importance of the established work.

The film draws us into the deepest, dark and dirty human intentions that led to and are even devoid of any humane sense. It is shown the downfall of modern humanity, which mimics the barbaric world of the past. The long centuries of experience appear to be insufficient to call for peace and universal existence. On the contrary, it seems that the negative trends will not disappear very soon.

Although it is not shown any atrocity, the stories of witnesses of the war are enough to push our imagination to unthinkable mental pictures. It remains impossible to think and honestly to sympathize to storytellers due to lack of language in which we could understand what they experienced. We can only be able to pity them when they do not find the strength to continue their stories and to bow to their power to tell everyone about the downfall of much part of mankind.

Extremely long and difficult story that requires serious approach and interest in the topic. Valuable result.

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To me "Shoah" represents an inversion of the other canonically revered Holocaust documentary, Resnais's ''Night and Fog". Resnais's short film has always made me a tad uncomfortable. Of course watching it, with its excerpts from films made by the Nazis documenting their own murders, is a powerful, even unforgettable experience. Yet, I always thought that Resnais was in a way blackmailing his audience into being "moved" by his film.  In showing images of the murders, he is not only displaying the victims in ways the victims cannot give their consent towards, he is also trying to make the audience say they have "seen" and understood the horror. This, it seems to me, is Resnais attempting to put his audience (and himself) in a position of "safe understanding" of the holocaust, like "been there, seen that".  The very sense of horror provoked by the film nonetheless protects the viewer from any sense of incomprehension. It provides an easily defined experience of revulsion.

Shoah, shot entirely in the "present" of people who lived through the Holocaust as prisoners, Nazis, or witnesses, operates on a more poetic level.  In a way it is not even a documentary on the Holocaust itself but a documentary about coping with the memory of disaster in the present.  The disaster cannot be shown, and it cannot really be described.  The stories one hears in the film are very moving, but part of what is so powerful about them is the way the speakers struggle to articulate their experience or convey their emotions.  At times, Lanzmann's interviews even seem a bit sadistic, like he is forcing the speakers to reveal their pain, but I think part of what is great about Shoah is that it has no pretension to being a "healing'' work.  Rather, in pointing to how any attempt to understand history, and particularly its disasters, can only be partially successful, partially remembered, Lanzmann does not shield himself, or the viewers of the film from the sense that the helplessness of the Other always strips the self of its own sense of empowerment, its ability to speak to or help or understand the Other.

On a historical level, the most interesting point for me was how much time and effort the Nazis devoted to the cover up of their crimes. I always had an image in my mind of the Nazi elite, and indeed many of the true-believing populace, being so ideologically fanatical that they didn't care who found out about the death camps because they truly believed they were doing good by "purifying" humanity. But everything here indicates that the regime's greatest fear was that anyone would find concrete evidence of the genocide. What at times almost operates as a kind of sick black comedy, however, is how much effort went into concealing the mass murders, and yet how utterly blatant it is that everyone knew what was happening to those herded to the camps.

I'm a bit amused by critics who lavish praise on the film by saying that, despite its subject matter, it is ultimately "life affirming" and "humane."  It seems to me that they have to say this if they are to laud the film, or they themselves will not seem "humane". I, for one, do not see it as, in any way whatsoever, a "warm" work. The Nazis interviewed in the film all seem like what they were- bureaucrats or yes-men who did their jobs to make their living. In Nazi Germany, mass-murder was an industry where many people made livelihoods. The most terrifying presences in the whole film are resistance fighters whose greatest joy in life was killing Nazis. One still feels an insatiable hatred towards humanity coming from them. One of the men's statement, "Lick my heart, you'd die of poison," is, for me, one of the greatest lines in all cinema, and the words I would use to summarize the experience of watching "Shoah." I must express my one and only displeasure with the film. No where in its nine and a half hours does Lanzmann interview or even mention any of the non-Jewish categories of people targeted for extermination by the Nazis. Watching this, you wouldn't even know that Roma, homosexual, and physically and mentally handicapped people were also slaughtered in the camps. These omissions fit nicely with Lanzmann's Zionist ideology, but that only underscores, I think, that this is a great work, but not a humanitarian one.

One reason why I'm drawn into cinema is that at its best it brings together all of art, transcends the boundaries, and without which I would be somehow clueless, somewhat not completely myself. Almost always I describe these films as important, subjectively speaking, and most of the time the mark they imprint upon me is a thirst for more, all this in the most positive sense one may imagine.

And then there's "Shoah" (1985). It's unbearably long, gruesomely shocking and depressing, and with certainty a film I don't wish to see again and see as a kind of anti-film. Yet that's precisely why it's remarkable, and why it is important. It's transcendental in a way that I've rarely witnessed: it disregards time and its own format, and simply exists. It doesn't care that it stops and meditates. To "linger" is a wrong choice of words, since it means staying in one place "longer than necessary, typically because of a reluctance to leave". The point is not to linger, but to endure. The point of the film is to exist as it is, as a witness. Thus one of its weaknesses, if one uses such comparative and charged term, becomes its essential characteristic: the film is all about not being a film, it's not about finding a quick way around a point to another. It's a record of pain, and it's not meant to be an easy-going experience.

"Shoah", then, is like a film that refuses to be a film. It was Ebert who called it "an act of witness". I agree. It is a witness to people reminiscing about something so horrible of which it's quite impossible to reminisce at all. But they do it, and their pain has been transferred to Lanzmann's poem. This poem doesn't try to make the incomprehensible comprehensible, but rather make that, which is incomprehensible to them, the survivors, equally incomprehensible to us. As such, "Shoah" is a monument, a collection of recollections that wrenches at the heart.

I suppose my reaction was the most natural there is after being exposed to what the Holocaust was: emptiness that is like a fleeing dream trying to catch its tail, unsuccessfully groping at the ever-distant memory. The feeling is that there was no way out, and there still isn't. That we can learn from the horrors of the past, but really don't. And at what cost? The survivors' testimonies, of their own survival and of the lives of those who didn't, is, in the end, the story that deserves to be told, again and again.

I saw "For All Mankind" (1989) shortly after this. I'd say these two films form a very perceptive cross-section of what we humans are like. The awe I felt during "Mankind" only intensified the opposite kind of awe, of dread, I felt during "Shoah": can this be the same humankind that is capable of both kinds of deeds, and almost contemporarily? No matter how far into space we launch ourselves, we carry within us both the darkness and the light, the hopelessness and hope. In the words of W. B. Yeats, "things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."