"Je n'avais que le néant - 'Shoah' par Lanzmann" (All I Had Was Nothingness) is not merely a companion piece to Claude Lanzmann's monumental "Shoah"; it is a visceral, often agonizing, excavation of its creation. This documentary transcends the typical "making-of" format, offering a profound insight into the very soul of a filmmaker wrestling with the unspeakable.
Guillaume Ribot delves into the creation of "Shoah," revealing not a quest for historical facts alone, but a profound search for the human perspective within the Holocaust. Unlike earlier documentaries like Alain Resnais' "Night and Fog," or the Mikhail Romm's Soviet film "Ordinary Fascism," ("Triumph Over Violence,") which relied heavily on archival footage and German documentation, telling the story of bloodiest crimes of unimaginable scale, Lanzmann's approach was radically different. He aimed to de-objectify the victims and perpetrators, moving beyond their roles as nameless figures in a historical tragedy and making it humane.
While the television series "Holocaust" was being produced and broadcast during the years Lanzmann was making his film, offering a dramatized narrative, Lanzmann focused on giving voice to the individuals who lived through the horrors, externalizing their personal experience. He sought to understand their experiences, their memories, and their emotional realities. It wasn't just a new narrative, but a whole new language, and "Je n'avais que le néant" reveals the challenges Lanzmann faced on all levels, from technical, to ontological. From hidden cameras to ethical dilemmas of cheating and lying to interviewees. Sometimes the most fundamental problems got resolved technically, like the agonizing process of pressing out memories from Abraham Bomba, who was unable to reach and speak out his dreadful past inside the Treblinka gas chambers, until Lanzmann put him in his former role of hairdresser, triggering the unlock of a flood of suppressed horrors.
This documentary possesses an emotional range that "Shoah," by its very nature, deliberately eschewed. Where "Shoah" maintains a stark, almost monotonous bleakness, "All I Had Was Nothingness" encompasses much wider specter of emotions, letting them contrast each other, highlighting almost surreal nature of some, like SS officer Suchomel suggestion that his heartache, emerged during the detailed description of mass exterminations, most likely related to lachs with creamy sauce overeating.
What emerges is a portrait of Lanzmann not as a detached historian, but as a relentless, almost possessed, seeker of humans on uncharted territories without any map. We witness his evolution from a man initially overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the Holocaust to a figure thunderstruck by the fact of near total involvement, discovering the whole world beyond every person, after spending countless hours in the Polish countryside, discovering the hidden testimonies of ordinary people. From "why would I even come to Poland, there's nobody left alive?" - to "I've been there four times, every season"
"All I Had Was Nothingness" demystifies the creation of "Shoah," revealing the painstaking, often brutal, process of transforming raw experience into a cinematic testament. It's a film that exposes the emotional toll on both the filmmaker and his subjects. Lanzmann's own words, "I wanted to resurrect them all on screen and kill them all again on that screen," encapsulate the film's central tension: the desire to bear witness and the inherent violence of reliving the past. This documentary is essential viewing, not just for understanding "Shoah," but for grasping the profound ethical and emotional complexities of documenting trauma. It stands as a testament to the path that cinema had to take to confront the darkest chapters of human history, and the immense cost of doing so.
