Shoah (1985)

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Shoah (1985) – C. Lanzmann

The key to understanding Claude Lanzmann’s 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust (Shoah means “annihilation”) may be to know, not only that the director was a French Jew who joined the Resistance at age 18, but that he was an Existentialist who worked with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Although the eyewitness testimonies from the Jewish men (and occasional women) who were brought to concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz and worked there, seeing their friends and family systematically murdered, are the most heart-wrenching and despairing to watch, Lanzmann’s interviews of German and Polish bureaucrats clearly exemplify the Existentialist concept of “bad faith”. Here, we see men denying that they could ever have known about the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews, men who are demonstrated by other testimony and documents to have had the facts in front of them, to be in the midst of a swirl of rumours impossible to reject – and yet, they tell the camera (sometimes a hidden camera) that they did not know. This denial of responsibility, the use of the mind’s devious ways of justifying itself, is the essence of “bad faith” and what the Existentialists suggest is the sure path to losing one’s humanity.  One can surely add the residents of the towns around Treblinka to the roster of those demonstrating the concept, as they maintain that the screams from the nearby camps were highly troubling to them – but yet they did nothing.  Perhaps they were afraid of the consequences of speaking out from the Germans – but I fear that is too generous an assumption; Lanzmann lets the interviewees indict themselves (and demonstrate a distressing residual anti-Semitism even in the late 70s/early 80s when filming took place). Indeed, Lanzmann’s strategy is to let the powerful words of the eyewitnesses speak for themselves – there is no voiceover, no authorial voice, no music; instead, we hear interviewee after interviewee recount a list of atrocities that is too much to listen to, let alone to have experienced.  Lanzmann calmly asks for specific details, such as the measurements of the gas chambers, the composition of the corpses and how high they were piled, the disposition and behaviour of people crammed into the railway cars, but also details of a much more mundane variety (for example, about the haircuts that were given to women before they were exterminated). These little details pile up and make the scenes vivid in an absolutely horrifying way but also serve Lanzmann’s purpose of offering an historical document for future generations (so that we are not doomed to repeat it).  The hundreds of hours of interviews (in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, French, and English) took 5 years to edit down to 9 hours – curiously Lanzmann and his team allow the witnesses to speak in their own language unsubtitled and only the interpreters’ translation into French is later translated into English. This allows the camera to study the faces of the men and women while they are speaking and later waiting, allowing viewers to observe and let it sink in. The film is not chronological but moves back and forth, letting the mammoth logistical undertaking of the Final Solution gradually emerge, but wisely ending with a look at the Warsaw Ghetto and the active resistance of the people there, showing that Jews fought back as best they could, even as their neighbours turned their backs.  Between and during the interviews, Lanzmann shows us the current locations where events took place (replicating that famous shot of Auschwitz from Night and Fog, 1955) but he never shows us the archival footage that we already have burned into our nightmares anyway. These quiet places and modern towns and cities look different, harbouring their awful secrets, recounted by these old men with sadness and pain in their eyes. Again, it’s the Existentialist’s philosophy to capture only the present moment, to ask how are you choosing to act now in your current existence? (This is not to deny the past but to learn from it). Are you, we, making the right choices today, in how we treat each other and in our support for those who are not treated right?