Shoah 9781844573257, 9781838713409, 9781844575640

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BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website: www.palgrave.com/bfi ‘Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.’ Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema.’ Times Higher Education Supplement ‘The series is a landmark in film criticism.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Edward Buscombe William P. Germano, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Austin Lee Grieveson, University College London Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Dana Polan, New York University B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

Shoah Sue Vice

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

For my brother and sister, John and Pip © Sue Vice 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on behalf of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Series cover design: Ashley Western Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Shoah, Historia Films/Films Aleph Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 ,6%1²²²² H,6%1²²²² H3')²²²²

Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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1 Lanzmann as Film-maker

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2 Documentary or ‘fiction of the real’?

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3 Archive Footage

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4 ‘Reincarnating’ the Past

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5 Mise en scène

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6 Lanzmann as Interviewer

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7 Poland: The Ethics of Filming

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8 Testimony

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Appendix: Overview of Shoah

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Notes

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Credits

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments Many thanks to Rebecca Barden, Amanda Bernstein, Jeffrey Bernstein, Sophia Contento, John Haffenden, Jonathan Rayner, Neil Roberts and Joy Tucker for editorial, filmic and stylistic assistance; to Claude Lanzmann for an interview; Bruce Levy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC; Alex George, Deborah Hill and Pete Lyons; the late Bryan Burns; the anonymous readers of the original typescript; and several generations of students. I am also grateful to the British Academy for a Small Research Grant awarded in relation to this project.

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Introduction In his interview with Michael Podchlebnik, a survivor of the forced ‘work detail’ at Chelmno extermination camp, Claude Lanzmann asks about the gas vans that were used for mass murder: What were the vans like? Like the ones that deliver cigarettes here. They were enclosed, with doubleleaf rear doors. What colour? The colour the Germans used – green, ordinary.

This low-key but chilling exchange sums up Lanzmann’s ethos throughout Shoah. His concern is with the industrialised mass killing

The gas vans were ‘green, ordinary’

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of the Holocaust years, and in particular death by gassing. These vans, in which victims were killed by directing exhaust fumes back into the body of the van, were introduced at Chelmno in 1941 as an alternative to mass shootings, and were the precusor to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Lanzmann asks small, factual questions about this process, and the effect is to bring the spectator up short: we learn that the gas vans were nothing special, and that we may see vehicles like them even today. The horrifying ordinariness of atrocity, the abolition of any difference between past and present, along with a reliance on our ability to visualise how genocide took place, are all present here. As the film critic Roger Ebert writes, in Shoah ‘the Holocaust is no longer a subject, a chapter of history, a phenomenon. It is an environment. It is around us. Ordinary people speak in ordinary voices of days that had become ordinary to them.’1 Shoah does not present information, nor a historical or philosophical thesis concerning the Holocaust, but a contemplation of that subject using specifically cinematic means to do so. Although Lanzmann’s film is about something absolutely out of the ordinary, its form reduces the distance between us and the events it represents. This is not only true of the survivors, with whom we might sympathise and wish to identify, but of the witnesses and perpetrators too, from whom we might prefer to keep a moral and cinematic distance, but whose slips and defences may be all too familiar. The ‘bystander’ Frau Michelson, wife of a Nazi teacher who spent the war in the village of Chelmno, can’t quite remember how many Jews were killed at the camp, nor whether the total number was 40,000 or 400,000 – ‘I knew it had a four in it,’ she says, when Lanzmann confirms that the total was indeed 400,000; while the former Nazi Franz Grassler, a prominent member of the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto during the war, seems to believe his own denial of responsibility to such an extent that he agreed to let Lanzmann film him voicing the notion that the Jews in the Ghetto knew more than he did about their impending fate: ‘It’s hard to believe,’ is Lanzmann’s

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dry response. The dialogue’s presentation of atrocity through uncannily ordinary detail is matched by what we see in these instances and throughout the film, following Lanzmann’s dictum that ‘Shoah is a fight against generalities.’2 Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour film Shoah was released in 1985 after thirteen years of filming and editing. Shoah is the second in his life’s work of films about the two central events in twentieth-century Jewish history, the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel. Pourquoi Israel, an exploration of the young state, was released in 1972 and runs at a relatively modest three hours, fifteen minutes. Shoah was followed in 1994 by Tsahal, Lanzmann’s film of five hours and fifteen minutes about the Israeli army, then by two separate releases of material from Shoah’s outtakes: Un vivant qui passe: Auschwitz 1943, Theresienstadt 1944 (A Visitor from the Living, 1997), about the visit to Theresienstadt of Maurice Rossell, a Red Cross official who said he must seem to the inmates like a ‘visitor from the living’ yet who declared the camp conditions satisfactory; and Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 4 pm, 16 heures (2001), consisting of an interview with Yehuda Lerner, a participant in the uprising at the Sobibor death camp. Shoah is composed of Lanzmann’s interviews with Holocaust survivors, bystanders and perpetrators, and the footage of these individuals is intercut with long sequences of panning shots of landscape and scenery, which may show the remnants of a camp, present-day cityscapes or the countryside, or shots of travelling trains. This is a deceptively simple format, yet Shoah’s standing is unrivalled in both film history and Holocaust representation. The Guardian film critic Derek Malcolm has called Shoah ‘one of the most remarkable films ever made’, while the historian Annette Wieviorka claims that ‘Shoah revolutionized testimony’3 by showing that it could be an aesthetic as well as a historical or legal tool. The footage of landscape may not be as obviously striking as that of the interviewees, but it is integral to the experience of watching Shoah. For instance, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir claims she could never have ‘imagined such a

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combination of beauty and horror’ as that we see in the juxtaposition of the film’s words and images, and this contrast emphasises not only Shoah’s status as a work of art, but the uncertainty of what we may witness when watching a film about the Holocaust: here, it is ‘beauty’ and not the images of atrocity.4 Ebert praises the long stretches of ‘quiet pastoral’ footage which leave us ‘enough time to think our own thoughts, to meditate, to wonder’, and to conjure up the presence of the very people who are absent from the landscape. Yet, although the present-day footage is often beautiful, and Lanzmann himself describes, for instance, the magnificent look of a steam train at dusk with its lights illuminated,5 such imagery is always meticulously edited to match, often in an uncomfortable way, what we hear on the soundtrack. For instance, during the return of the death-camp survivor Simon Srebnik to the Polish village of Chelmno, with its riverside setting, the voices of invisible Polish villagers are heard saying, ‘What happened here was a murder.’ In the words of Ziva Postec, one of the film’s editors, ‘The conjunction of

Chelmno today

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the word “murder” with the peaceful and serene landscape was in fact the key, the organ point according to which we later built the structure of the entire film.’6 Equally, the encounter with Podchlebnik from which I have quoted begins with a long sequence in which we do not see the interviewee. Instead, the camera’s vantage point is that of a vehicle driving quickly down a road and past a village sign that reads ‘Chel⁄ mno’. This footage is deliberately juxtaposed with Podchlebnik’s words in voiceover, uttered by him in Yiddish and then in English in the third person by the translator, about the journey made by the work detail to the camp: ‘in the morning they reached Chelmno’. The camera implies a highly self-conscious but nonetheless unsettling parallel experience in the present to that of Podchlebnik in 1941. When Podchlebnik describes the ‘graffiti’ in Yiddish scratched onto the walls of a cellar, including people’s names and the warning ‘No one leaves here alive’, the camera ceases its swift panning, as if searching for something, and comes to a halt at a nondescript old The site of murder

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building with illegible notices pinned to its wooden door. We cannot see the graffiti of the past nor do we learn the victims’ names, but the camera’s focus implies that we are at the site of murder. Podchlebnik describes the moment of the victims’ death in the gas van: ‘When there was total silence, the van left,’ and in the present it is Lanzmann’s van that leaves; it retraces its journey and the camera films the retreat out of the back window. In a reprise of several instances of images of drifting smoke in Shoah, representing the burning of dead bodies, here we see wafts of the film-van’s exhaust fumes. Wrenched out of their ordinariness for a moment, the fumes are an unnerving symbol of the means of murder. What we see remains engimatic: a food kiosk, a bus stop, muddy wasteland, some new buildings in the process of construction. It is all that remains of the site of the death camp. The imagery here is not conventionally beautiful, but consists of a run-down rural village on a cold, grey day. The spectator’s impatience to see Podchlebnik as well as hear his voice is satisfied at last when Lanzmann asks, via the interpreter, if he understood that the people in the vans had died. The cut to a close-up of the interviewee is matched by a change in the look of the shot: it is characterised by the whiteness of Podchlebnik’s shirt and the railings behind him. We see the remnants of the smile about which Lanzmann asked Podchlebnik in the first interview (‘Why does he smile all the time?’), his awkward swallowing and defensive eye movements, as if he expects a very difficult or painful question. Although there is temporal alignment between landscape and interviewee – Podchlebnik speaks in the present, just as the footage of Chelmno is that of the present – they are spatially at odds and Podchlebnik is no longer in Poland, but in Israel. When Lanzmann asks him what the vans were like, the question is so unexpected that Podchlebnik misunderstands and thinks he is being asked what the people were like. His answer is cut off by the translator and he is asked again about the vans. He even acts out with arm movements the opening of the van’s double doors, bringing a phantom gas van into the present moment and our field of vision. In this way, via Podchlebnik’s initial

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misunderstanding, an awareness of the unusual nature of Lanzmann’s interest in minutiae and everyday detail is built into the film itself. As the encounter with Podchlebnik reveals, the relations between soundtrack and image are meticulously constructed throughout Shoah not only to show the spectator the witness in the present, but also to imply the world of the past.

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1 Lanzmann as Film-maker Lanzmann’s 2009 autobiography, Le Lièvre de Patagonie, is named for the wily Patagonian hare with which its author clearly identifies. In Le Lièvre he paints a portrait of himself as a man of action as well as a central figure in French post-war intellectual life. Lanzmann fought with the French resistance in 1944 at the age of eighteen, flew with a daredevil Israeli fighter pilot while making his 1994 film Tsahal, and was a natural in the saddle when he tried his hand at horse-riding. Although Lanzmann is best known, particularly outside France, as a film-maker, he first made his name as a writer. Lanzmann describes his hesitation at embarking on the project of Pourquoi Israel, having never taken a single course on film-making.7 Rather, his training was philosophical. As a student after the war, Lanzmann wrote a postgraduate thesis on the impossibility of choice in Leibniz’s work, of which he drily observes: ‘It’s not by chance that Shoah runs for nine and a half hours.’8 It was as the result of a series of articles published in Le Monde in 1952 on the continuing presence of Nazism in German higher education, drawing on his time spent teaching and studying at the universities of Tübigen and Berlin, that Lanzmann was invited by Jean-Paul Sartre to work on the radical journal Les Temps modernes, of which he is the editorial director to this day. Lanzmann became a close colleague and friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, and was for several years Simone de Beauvoir’s (one and only) livein lover. He spent many years as an investigative writer for a variety of publications, including Les Temps modernes, Le Monde, Elle and L’Express, covering a great range of contemporary subjects including life in North Korea and China in the 1950s, the life of the Dalai Lama, the fight for independence in Algeria, as well as the faits divers of assorted crimes and legal trials. It is tempting to see in

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this range the seeds of Shoah’s methodology of approaching a historical event by means of small, concrete details. Lanzmann’s high regard for Sartre as a man and as a thinker is evident throughout his autobiography, although he tried (fruitlessly) to prevent his sister Évélyne becoming the philosopher’s lover: thus both Sartre and de Beauvoir ended up with, as Frederic Raphael pithily puts it, ‘a pet Lanzmann’. Raphael goes on to claim that Shoah could be seen as a ripose of sorts to Sartre’s disembodied view of Jewish life in his Anti-Semite and Jew.9 Lanzmann recounts with obvious relish Sartre’s comment, having seen Shoah, that its director showed that Jews are not simply the construction of antisemitism. A decisive event for Lanzmann was a commission to write a series of articles for Le Monde on Israel in 1952. After a long visit to the new state, he decided that a journalistic format was not suitable for a topic that had such personal resonance for him. He rejected Sartre’s advice to write a book on the subject, and a visit to Suez in the late 1960s to make a film for French television inspired him to turn to film-making instead. The result was Pourquoi Israel, Lanzmann’s first feature. The format of editing together interviews from a range of sources without an authoritative voiceover is used here by Lanzmann for the first time, as a way of representing irreconcilable views and perspectives on the subject. Pourquoi Israel was released in October 1973, just at the time of the Yom Kippur War in which Israel eventually gained the upper hand over the attacking Egyptian and Syrian armies. Both parts of Lanzmann’s persona, the man of action and the intellectual, are evident in his on-screen persona as interviewer and auteur – and, some would say, film-star10 – in all his films but most strikingly in Shoah. He is often present in both the mise en scène and soundtrack of Shoah at personal risk to himself, for instance in the secretly filmed sequences with former Nazis, and as part of a film-making philosophy that lays bare the mechanisms of question and answer. In Le Lièvre de Patagonie, Lanzmann observes that he is the ‘absolute contemporary’ of the Holocaust years. Born in Clermont-

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Ferrand, Paris, in 1925 to first-generation French citizens Armand and Paulette and raised in a secular Jewish household, Lanzmann was fourteen when the war began, and he recounts how the Nazis’ racial policies affected his family. Lanzmann père dug a hiding-place in the garden and made Claude, his brother Jacques and sister Évélyne practise until they were able to dress silently and leave the house within moments of waking in the night, in case the Gestapo should appear at the door.11 Yet, despite living under such a threat, until he began work on Shoah Lanzmann saw the Holocaust itself as ‘legendary’ rather than a historical event or one to which he was a direct witness. Tellingly, he describes seeing a column of Ukrainian refugees in the immediate aftermath of the war whom he later came to realise were fleeing the Polish death camps where they had been guards; his view of the Holocaust itself was distant and oblique. Critics have regretted the absence from Shoah of any interviewee from occupied western Europe, particularly considering Lanzmann’s experience of Vichy France,12 but this experience does not fit the film’s philosophical or aesthetic concerns. Shoah is about the industrialised mass death of the Holocaust years,13 and its form is constructed to represent this genocide although not to show it. It is about the witness and remembrance of an attempted total destruction. Lanzmann approaches the subject of mass death by means of interviews with those who were the closest witnesses to the process of industrialised killing set alongside footage of the locations of death in the present day. Hence his reliance on two particular kinds of shot construction: the zoom, used in close-ups of witnesses’ faces and the details of buildings and landscapes, and, by contrast, the tracking shots of landscapes and train-lines, which re-enact the experience of a deathly journey. Lanzmann shot around 350 hours of footage for Shoah and rigorously edited this material into the nine-and-a-half-hour-long feature film that was released in 1985. During the long years of filming Shoah, Lanzmann travelled to fourteen countries and interviewed over fifty individuals. Some, including Abraham Bomba,

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who had worked as a barber at the death camp Treblinka, took years of painstaking research to track down, while others, such as the former Nazis Franz Schalling, who had been a guard at the death camp Chelmno, and Walter Stier, who was responsible for the railway system of Nazi Germany, were filmed without their knowledge. In Shoah we see Lanzmann’s encounters with survivors, bystanders and perpetrators; he also interviewed others with less easily definable connections to the events of the Holocaust, including Jan Karski, former courier to the Polish government in exile; Albert Spiess, prosecutor at the 1960 Treblinka trial; and the historian Raul Hilberg. But Shoah does not simply amount to a series of interviews. The project was mooted by Alouf Hareven, a member of the Israeli foreign office, who argued that on the strength of his earlier Pourquoi Israel Lanzmann was the only film-maker capable of creating a film that would ‘not be about the Shoah but which would be the Shoah’.14 In other words, the film would itself constitute a piece of reality and not be simply a reflection of it. Lanzmann conceived of this commission in terms of a philosophical and filmic meditation on, and investigation of, an unprecedented crime. Although the film’s form – its editing, shot construction, soundtrack – is crucial to that project, its look was also determined by the difficulty Lanzmann experienced in funding the film. He relied upon French and Israeli sources, and describes the process of putting together sufficient financial support as a constant ‘relay’ in which the torch of funding was passed from one sponsor to another, many of whom were personal friends.15 Despite a gruelling schedule of visits to many American cities, Lanzmann describes himself with a mixture of pride and ruefulness as a ‘terrible fundraiser’, unable to respond when asked what the ‘message’ of his film would be: thus ‘there wasn’t a single American dollar in Shoah’s budget’.16 According to an interview with the director just after the film’s release, it cost between $3 and $4 million to make, and Lanzmann had to take out a loan of 4 million francs to complete it.17 For reasons of economy, as well as his commitment to simplicity, all

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of the footage, apart from that recorded secretly, was shot using a single 16mm camera which meant a change of reel every eleven minutes. Lanzmann insisted on recording the soundtrack at the same time as the image and making no post-production changes to either, apart from ordering and cutting the 350 hours of footage, so as to preserve the authenticity of how, and for how long, utterance takes place. With typical aesthetic and ethical forthrightness, the director declares, ‘It’s the assassination of time that is immoral!’, seen most typically in televisual editing where material can be cut and juxtaposed to construct a particular argument.18 Lanzmann presents himself as an auteur whose individual creative vision is imprinted on his films. In an interview with Max Dax about Tsahal, his film on the Israeli army, Lanzmann explains that his aim is not to present a balanced, rounded version of historical fact, but rather an aesthetic, auteurist vision. He contrasts the material in the outtakes of Shoah, held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has the status of raw data, with the artefact that is the final cut: ‘I am the creator, director and author of Shoah.’19 Although he often appears, of necessity, on screen, Lanzmann was also always responsible for the set-up of the shot, its framing and construction. When Lanzmann was not able to conduct the filming himself, he developed a system of gesture and touch to signal to the cameraman what he wanted.20 The constraints of location filming could sometimes be turned to advantage, as in the case of the apparently insoluble conundrum of how to film in Chelmno, a ‘peasant village of absolutely no beauty’, where low terraced houses crowded along each side of the main street. Lanzmann decided to film from a horse-and-cart, and we see the result in the footage of Chelmno that accompanies the interviews with Srebnik and with Frau Michelson, wife of the Nazi schoolteacher stationed there: ‘the camera could include in a single frame the muddy road, the houses, the church, the rump and tail of the horse … the regular beat of hooves on the asphalt making Frau Michelson’s words even more horrifying’.21

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In his autobiography Lanzmann describes how he chose those he interviewed, and then ‘the exceptional personalities’22 from among these interviewees whom he included in the final cut of Shoah. These include the three survivor ‘heroes’, to use Lanzmann’s term, Richard Glazar, Filip Müller and Rudolf Vrba, who, as Czechs, were among the first to be deported; as well as individuals such as Karski, Bomba and Srebnik, whose interviews are the best known and most widely discussed. Lanzmann located his ‘heroes’ and other protagonists through a variety of means. Reading the transcripts of the Treblinka trial held in Frankfurt in 1960 led him to Glazar and Suchomel, while the West German justice agency in Ludwigsburg dedicated to tracking down former Nazis furnished him with the names of those who had been perpetrators. Some of the former Nazis who appear in Shoah, including Suchomel and Stier, were paid to be interviewed, much to the chagrin of Lanzmann’s cinematographer William Lubtchansky, whose father had died in Auschwitz and who questioned the ethics of acting hospitably towards such individuals. Almost all of the Jewish ‘protagonists’ in the film are former Sonderkommando members, those who were responsible for the disposal of the bodies and belongings of people who were gassed, because they are ‘the only direct witnesses of the extermination of their people’.23 Lanzmann’s reading of Hilberg’s historical account, The Destruction of the European Jews, which does not focus on the voices of survivors but describes and cites ‘the Nazi protagonists’, convinced him that he could not make such a film without also featuring in it the killers.24 Yet Lanzmann’s insistence on including charismatic survivors is in the service of an apparently paradoxical goal, since none of these interviews is meant to tell a single story or encourage us to marvel over an untypical instance of survival. Rather, the individuals speak about a collective experience on behalf of the millions of the dead. This is the end to which Lanzmann enlists Abraham Bomba’s skill as a ‘magnificent’ orator, Filip Müller’s ‘golden’ voice and Michael Podchlebnik’s painfully expressive face, always shown in extreme close-up as he describes his experiences in

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Richard Glazar

Rudolf Vrba

Filip Müller

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the work detail at Chelmno and which, for Lanzmann, took on the status of ‘the place of the Shoah’. For this reason we do not learn anything more about these individuals’ lives or how they survived; they are simply ‘les porte-parole’, or spokespersons, for the dead.25 Such a combination of individual charisma with actual impersonality is often signalled by the start of a particular interview, which frequently begins not with a close-up of a face but with footage of a landscape, train-track or ruined building as we hear a voice talking. Only as the voice speaks do we learn what the buildings are and who the testifier is: the image precedes such detail. The secretly filmed interview with former Reichsbahn bureacrat Walter Stier begins with his voice, claiming never to have seen a train, heard over a long travelling shot of a moving coal wagon with the camera looking out over the engine’s steam funnel. There is an implicit riposte in the clear image of this journeying train to Stier’s denial. When we do see Stier’s face, it is in the form of an image on the screen inside Lanzmann’s VW filming van. Although we see the former Nazi’s face in close-up, it is a close-up on another screen. This is a mediation which matches Stier’s evasions and failure to answer the questions put to him; yet the indistinct, bluish image also contrasts with the extreme clarity that the spectator gains about Stier’s actual knowledge and responsibility. Lanzmann, who is hardly visible during this encounter except as his position is constructed by Stier’s look off-screen, describes his interviewee as, ‘the most contemptible Nazi who appears in Shoah’.26 The way in which the clandestinely shot interview is shown to us supports this estimate.

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2 Documentary or ‘fiction of the real’? Lanzmann insists that Shoah is not a documentary but what he calls a ‘fiction du réel’, a fiction of the real. In his insistence on the role of artistry in filming reality Lanzmann is in accord with a long tradition of both film-makers and critics. Although films are most often distinguished on the grounds of their factual or fictional nature, as opposed to other possible generic labels,27 in practice the differences are hard to establish. Robert Flaherty’s 1926 film Moana, about the lives of Polynesians on a Samoan island, is often taken to be the first documentary feature in film history, and it was in a review of it that John Grierson coined the term. But Moana’s reliance upon stagings and re-enactments of the non-western rites that the natives had already abandoned suggests that, even at its founding moment, documentary film was a hybrid and diverse genre. The description given of the documentary form by Grierson, who founded the British Documentary Film Movement in the 1930s, as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’,28 has been widely cited precisely for its acknowledgment of the role of inventiveness and artistry in such film-making. Just as it is claimed that there is no way of using internal evidence to determine whether a passage of prose is fiction or fact,29 so it is only in terms of extra-textual cues that a documentary film can be reliably identified. For instance, David Holroyd’s 2008 film wmd. is purportedly a documentary about the invasion of Iraq by the UK and USA, but only fully establishes fiction as its true genre in the end credits. Yet its mise en scène often has a staged look and its buttonhole interviews are always in focus, thus advertising its fictional status.30 Neither modes of production, such as the use of particular kinds of technology, nor reception by critics, is alone sufficient to produce foolproof generic labels. The visual effects of the documentary staples of 16mm and Super 8 film, and the effect of hand-held cameras and

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impromptu interviews, are often reproduced in fictional film as a vérité ‘look’; while genuine interviews or confrontations may take place within a fictional frame. This suggests that Sarah Cooper is right to argue that, although internal evidence may appear to be conclusive, documentary film is ‘a mode of response’ rather than a fixed genre,31 one constructed through the act of viewing and by the way in which spectators evaluate what they see. Writers such as the philosopher Jacques Rancière observe that the construction of a plotted series of events is crucial to factual and fictional film alike, and Rancière cites what he calls the ‘provocative’ opening rolling title of Shoah as an example of this shared concern: ‘The story starts in the present in Chelmno.’32 Here, the ‘story’ in question is not fictional but a factual narrative; the name ‘Chelmno’ refers to a place as well as to a time. ‘Chelmno’ has a ‘legendary’ meaning, to use Lanzmann’s term, as the location of wartime genocide, but it still exists in an everyday sense as the village of that name. Shoah depends on just the kind of tension generated by these two meanings.

Shoah begins

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The usual conventions of interviewing and translating are not held to in Shoah, and once more this disruption of and selfconsciousness about filmic technique forms part of its meaning. We hear witnesses speak in their own tongue (or, at least, their chosen tongue, in the case of many of the Jewish testifiers) before any translation is given, in French; it is the translation and not the utterance that is subtitled in English. This allows the spectator to watch the witness’s face and hear their voice without interference from translation, and begin to understand what they are saying. In interview, Lanzmann argues that any other way of conveying the film’s polyphonic Babel would have been impossible with a single camera, given the four stages of question and answer via a translator.33 The scope of the film Shoah takes as its title the Hebrew word for ‘whirlwind’ or ‘catastrophe’, although originally Lanzmann called it simply ‘Holocauste’. Naming it thus in Hebrew conveys its specific focus on the Jewish victims of the Nazis’ genocidal actions. Some commentators have criticised Lanzmann’s choice for this reason, or because in its biblical context the word refers only to natural disaster.34 Annette Wieviorka notes simply that, ‘because the word “Holocaust” means “burnt offering” French scholars prefer “Shoah”, taken from the title of Claude Lanzmann’s film’,35 acknowledging Shoah’s profound influence on the terms of debate. However, it seems that Lanzmann is not drawing on the word’s etymology but giving it a new definition, and one that has been widely adopted in writings on the Holocaust: it refers specifically to the mass killing of Europe’s Jews. Within this, Shoah’s central concern is with the death camps and the precise methods of industrialised killing. In his autobiography, Lanzmann describes how the first interviews he undertook in France familiarised him with the early stages of deportation and the ‘routine of atrocity’ in the camps, but he soon realised that he had no way of understanding the ‘essential’

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experience and meaning of the Holocaust. For Lanzmann, this was the process of death by gassing. As he puts it, ‘The day I understood this, I knew that the subject of my film would be death itself, death and not survival.’36 This is the ‘radical contradiction’ at the heart of Lanzmann’s conception of Shoah: following Primo Levi’s observation in The Drowned and the Saved, it was those who ‘drowned’, not those who survived, whose knowledge of the event was complete but therefore lost.37 The achievement of Shoah is that Lanzmann includes in his film those who lived so close to the machinery of death that they take on the status of ‘revenants’ who can speak on behalf of those who died. Lanzmann prefaces his film with a quotation from Isaiah, as if speaking in the prophet’s place, to remind us that those we do not see or hear are nonetheless the film’s very subject: ‘I will give them an everlasting name.’ Indeed, in Shoah the interviewees are presented as if they too had died and returned from the dead. In the film’s opening rolling title, we learn about Simon Srebnik, one of only two survivors of Chelmno: During the night of January 18, 1945, two days before Soviet troops arrived, the Nazis killed all the remaining Jews in the ‘work details’ with a bullet in the head. Simon Srebnik was among those executed. But the bullet missed his vital brain centres.

Individuals like Srebnik ‘should have died’,38 and his experience is described as if he did: ‘Srebnik was among those executed.’ Equally, Lanzmann’s first question to the other survivor of Chelmno, Michael Podchlebnik, is, via the translator: ‘What died in him in Chelmno?’; and later we learn that he begged to be shot alongside his wife. This act of witness arising from proximity is shared by others such as Simcha Rottem, who survived the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto; or those, like Motke Zaïdel, who had to exhume the bodies of the dead from mass graves in Lithuania; by the Polish bystanders and others who saw and heard the convoys of Jews, or operated the trains that transported them; and, of course, by the killers – hence

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their importance for Lanzmann. This preoccupation with the victims’ last minutes as a way of understanding the Holocaust meant that Lanzmann was especially interested in those who had actually crossed the threshold of the gas vans and gas chambers in the course of their work but did not die there, including Bomba, who entered the gas chamber at Treblinka to cut the women prisoners’ hair before they were gassed, and Müller, who had to undress the corpses in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. It seems to be a further paradox that Lanzmann’s aim is to ‘reincarnate’ this vanished past when his focus is on the living witnesses in the present. Where archive footage might simply ‘illustrate’ the past in an inert and unidentified manner, the encounters in Shoah reveal both the continued presence of the past, and enable its fleeting recovery. It could be argued that this is an impossible or damaging project in psychological terms for those like Bomba and Karski who have to pay the price of that ‘reliving’. Dominick LaCapra reads Lanzmann’s quest for reincarnation as a

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psychological cruelty which takes the form of a ‘compulsive acting out of the past – particularly its traumatic suffering – in the present’.39 It might also seem that the film’s hidden agenda is to seek a redress for the terrible losses of the Holocaust years. However, such reincarnation in Shoah is of a specifically filmic kind. We frequently witness its occurrence, for instance when Jan Karski starts to talk about the Warsaw Ghetto: ‘I go back thirty-five years,’ and then cannot do so: ‘I do not go back.’ We see him leave his seat and go out of shot, and it is the camera’s fixed focus on the empty chair that conveys the price Karski must pay for the return of the past. Indeed, as he leaves the frame Karski’s remark, ‘I come back’, refers equally to a promise to his return to the interview and to the past itself. Shoah lacks many of the features often associated with documentary film, including a chronological structure, a consistent voiceover or a musical score and the use of archive footage. Instead, it relies upon staging of various kinds as part of its project – although not for the purposes of recreation or simulation, but to enable its approach to the past. The artifice of staging enables authenticity of recall, however, since Lanzmann insists that only once, in the case of Henryk Gawkowski, the train-driver at Treblinka, did he hear the witness’s testimony in advance before filming it. In an account of being interviewed, Jan Karski says he asked if he could prepare his answers ahead but Lanzmann refused to allow it.40 It is the lack of archive footage that is the most distinctive of these features, particularly for a film concerned with the Holocaust. Documentaries such as L⁄ ódz´ Ghetto (Alan Adelson, 1989) and Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955) not only include a great deal of such archive material, but construct meaning out of the contrast between present-day and wartime footage, particularly when the two are edited together or appear in the close juxtaposition of montage. In Shoah, it is not such contrast but the collapse of temporal difference that Lanzmann seeks. The visual elements of Shoah are crucial in this respect. They draw attention to the gulf between what

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Treblinka villagers

Czeslaw Borowi

Claude Lanzmann

The throat-cutting gesture

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we see in the present, and the past that we are forced to imagine; yet what we see is often a signifier or symbol of historical trauma using the elements of that history. Such symbols take various forms. Henryk Gawkowski drives a train down a specially reopened track towards the camp at Treblinka, and this symbolic journey provokes his almost bodily memory of the throat-cutting sign of warning made by Poles standing by the track to the Jews in the cattle cars, a gesture so memorable that it is quoted in fictive form in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). In Shoah, several instances of different Polish bystanders re-enacting this gesture are edited closely together; after the last one, in which the farmer from Treblinka, Czeslaw Borowi, acts it out three times, we are briefly and agonisingly wrong-footed by a cut to Abraham Bomba’s voice, as he says, ‘There was a sign, a small sign …’. But this is deceptive; Bomba does not provide the reverse viewpoint for the throat-cutting gesture, although that is what the juxtaposition implies a wish for; rather, it becomes clear he is referring to the ‘Treblinka’ sign at that station. Later, Richard Glazar does provide the victim’s perspective of the ‘funny gesture’ from within a train bound for Treblinka. In another instance, Motke Zaïdel and Itzhak Dugin explicitly contrast the landscape of Beth Shemen forest in Israel with the killing-ground of Ponari in Lithuania. In the foreground of the shot while the camera pans across the Israeli forest we see the smoke of bonfires, and, as Zaïdel puts it, ‘It’s as if the bodies had been burned here.’ The fire in the present is neither a symbol nor a recreation; rather, like Gawkowski’s reenacted train journey, it is a trigger, in this case for the spectator as well as the witness, to conjure up a mental image or conception of the scene described. In such a creative use of the visual to represent the past, Shoah conforms to Lanzmann’s description of it as a fiction of the real. For this reason it is inaccurate to argue, as Frederic Raphael does, that Shoah is ‘less directed than compiled’:41 it is not a historical work, nor the presentation of unmediated data, but a specifically and often self-consciously cinematic meditation on witness and loss.

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By contrast, the other features of Shoah are not as unusual as its exclusive focus on the present moment. The editing of footage so that meaning is constructed through juxtaposition rather than chronology, as we see it in Shoah, is a technique shared, for instance, by Michael Wadleigh’s documentary Woodstock (1970), where Country Joe McDonald’s ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-to-Die Rag’ is ‘brilliantly repositioned’ after John Sebastian’s ‘Younger Generation’ in order to acknowledge the ‘staggering parade of draft-age humanity’ that made up most of the festival’s audience.42 But it is one thing to alter the order of a three-day rock concert, and another to edit 350 hours of film footage about a six-year-long war. Shoah covers the years 1941 to 1943, but sections are placed together for the sake of the poetic and philosophical meaning that Lanzmann seeks throughout, rather than according to historical logic. As he puts it, ‘Until now, all films dealing with the Holocaust have tried to generate it by using the expedients of history and chronological Ben Sheman forest, Israel

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development’:43 Shoah does not seek such causal relations or explanations for the Holocaust. Narrative structure The film’s preference for thematic plotting over chronology is unusual, although not without precedent, in a film about the Holocaust. Although Resnais’ film has a roughly linear structure, starting with the rise of the Nazis in Germany and ending with the liberation of the camps, Night and Fog presents a collage of footage and images to support its polemic, inspired by the Algerian war of the 1950s, against forgetfulness and political inaction. The well-known photograph of the young boy in a large cap standing with his hands raised, under arrest in the Warsaw Ghetto at the time of the Uprising in 1943, appears out of order, accompanying a description of deportees being ‘rounded up in Warsaw’, not long after a ‘1933’ intertitle and several minutes before ‘1942’ appears. Night and Fog has some similarities to Shoah, and critics have argued that Lanzmann was influenced by such motifs as footage of the peaceful contemporary settings of the atrocities of the past, although in Resnais’ case such footage is always contrasted with archive imagery. And, like Lanzmann’s, Resnais’ camera follows the railway-lines at Auschwitz in long tracking shots, searching for ‘traces’ of the past. But the appearance of the photograph of the little boy out of chronological order shows the illustrative role that such imagery has in Night and Fog, and which Shoah shuns. Although the latter is not consistent in building up a chronological picture – for instance, we learn how Richard Glazar became a kapo, or prisoner-functionary, after he describes acting as one; and see an old couple dance in a Berlin night-club before we hear Inge Deutschkron’s description of the herding of the city’s Jews into the Klu dance restaurant in preparation for their deportation – its order is governed by an internal narrative logic. Sarah Cooper identifies just such a tension, between ‘particularizing and generalizing’,44 as constitutive of a central

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tradition in French documentary cinema. Shoah, however, does not fully conform to this pattern. It does not conclude, as Night and Fog does, with a warning about the ‘endless cry’ of the future, but with a shot of a train rolling that returns us to the past. Although Shoah is about the process of witness and remembrance, its concern is always with a specific historical event. On the other hand, Shoah does treat its subject in a manner that combines the general and particular, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Horrifying events are recounted and relived in family homes; the mechanisms and locations of the atrocities of the past are compared with the setting of the interviews; Lanzmann himself ‘walks the terrain’45 of death in its peaceful present-day incarnation. At the very moment when familiarity is invoked, it has a horrifying unknowability. In this way Shoah’s form makes it an example par excellence of a certain kind of documentary, which does not simply return spectators to their own world and level out differences between worlds.46 In this respect, documentary offers a different model of spectatorship to that of psychoanalytic film theory, which argues that the camera and spectator share the same gaze while the screen itself is a mirror which reflects back the watching self. In Shoah we often see the imagery of reflective surfaces, mirrors, windows and apertures, but always to suggest that it is the image of the past that is invisible. Various techniques take the place of voiceover in Shoah, including the long opening rolling title text about Srebnik’s experience in Chelmno, a kind of explanation which is not repeated elsewhere, although there are other brief, factual titles. Lanzmann’s own presence is also a unifying factor. His role is a hybrid of director and interviewer; this is not a documentary in which the director works invisibly behind the scenes, such as The World at War (Thames Television, 1973–4), or in which the protagonists respond to questions we do not hear, as is the case in Kapo (Dani Siton and Tor Ben-Mayor, 1999).47 Indeed, because of the absence of voiceover, the spectator of Shoah is made to work hard to understand the meaning

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of individual sequences and their relation to one another in terms of their order. In the section about survivors in Corfu, a variety of particularly enigmatic materials is presented without commentary. In this sequence, the first thing we see is a close-up of a crumpled old print of four pigs; the hands holding it fold up the print ingeniously so that it forms a caricature of Hitler’s face. The camera pans slowly upwards to show us the man, Moishe Mordo, holding the print; at first his look, catching the camera’s in an eyeline match, is solemn, then he smiles impishly about this wartime relic. Soon after, the camera performs a reverse movement. We see Mordo’s face, barely containing grief at the memory of his dead family; the camera pans down over his blue shirt to his hands holding photographs of his father and children, in a shot replicating that of the Hitler caricature. The repeated but reversed trajectory of the camera – the close-up of a face is followed by a slow pan to another close-up – places in parallel the face of a dictator with the faces of murdered family members, but A caricature of Hitler’s face

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the difference between them is encapsulated by what we see of Mordo’s emotions. The sequence concludes with a scene in a Corfu synagogue. We continue to hear the singing voices of this aged community, whose young have been killed, during the final moments of the sequence in which five old men walk away from the camera down a cobbled street, casting long shadows behind them in the evening sun. This concluding shot presents a mixture of beauty with the presentiment of death. It is only in the outtakes and in Lanzmann’s autobiography that the detail of what we see is made clear, for instance how the secret filming of former Nazis such as Stier took place, and what the background is for what we see in the encounter with Suchomel. The former death-camp guard agreed to an anonymous audio interview and this takes place in a studio hired by Lanzmann, who also provided the map of Treblinka that hangs on the wall and the sinister-seeming pointer – in reality a fishing-rod – that Suchomel eagerly uses to make clear Treblinka’s layout, giving him the look of a ‘Holocaust pedagogue’, in Lanzmann’s tart phrase.48 Because Suchomel had agreed to an audio interview, Lanzmann was able to explain the presence of a sound engineer who also clandestinely recorded images using the newly developed microphone-sized ‘paluche’ camera. Some commentators have expressed doubts about the ethics of using material which is not only filmed secretly without the subject’s agreement, but which, in this case, records the very breaking of the ‘ethical touchstone’ of ‘informed consent’:49 Lanzmann includes in Shoah the moment where he falsely promises to preserve Suchomel’s anonymity. Others regard this trickery as part of Shoah’s commitment to its own ethical and aesthetic code, following the terms in which Lanzmann describes his secret filming of former Nazis in Germany: he was able to ‘trick the tricksters’, as he puts it (‘tromper les trompeurs’).50 Many critics, including Lanzmann himself, refer to the aesthetic logic of Shoah’s structure. Its basic division is into two ‘epochs’, a term Lanzmann prefers to ‘part’, the first of which takes place

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outside the gas chambers and the second within,51 showing to what extent the content in Shoah always determines the structure. As Dominick LaCapra points out, the first epoch ends with the Simon Srebnik recounting his fear that he was ‘the last Jew’, accompanied by the image of a journeying Saurer van, the kind that was used for gassing; the second ends with Simcha Rottem’s similar memory of fearing he was ‘the last Jew’, alongside the image of a travelling train. The long process of cutting and editing, of which Lanzmann observed that, ‘each minute was edited as carefully as though the entire film would last only that one minute’,52 went towards a complex structure of links between sequences following the logic of content, phrasing, location and, at times, historical detail. The editor Ziva Postec notes the difficulty of creating a film out of the 350 hours of ‘noncinematographic material’ that constituted the interview footage. Her observation that, ‘the raw rushes had no resemblance whatsoever to a film’,53 suggests that what spectators take to be the heart of the film – ‘A Holocaust pedagogue’

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its interviews – was not sufficient in itself to create an art-work. Only with the addition of landscape and train shots did the film come into being. It is possible to analyse Shoah in various ways, drawing out patterns to make sense of its nine-and-a-half-hour extent (see my overview of the film’s structure and interlinking cinematic themes in the Appendix). For instance, in her preface to the text, Simone de Beauvoir highlights three governing tropes in the film: places, voices and faces. Such a formulation emphasises the film’s dialogue as well as its imagery. Lanzmann describes the process of editing in which he conceived of the work as divided into ‘mini-films’ – for instance, one concerning Chelmno, another about Grabow54 – and this pattern by location is also perceptible in the final version. For instance, the whole of the last section of the film – including interviews with Jan Karski, Raul Hilberg, the former Nazi Franz Grassler, Gertrude Schneider (who sings a song) and Simcha Rottem – is devoted to the Warsaw Ghetto. Others have argued it is the imagery of trains, which appears throughout, that unites the film in both visual and narrative terms. The French term for tracking shot, ‘le travelling’, conveys the sense sought by Lanzmann of a physical reprise of ‘the last journey’.55 The omnipresence of trains in image, dialogue and soundtrack in Shoah conveys their central role in industrialised mass murder, since for the Nazis ‘deportation was the critical transition from relocation to murder’.56 In visual terms, footage of trains constitutes transitions between sequences, and also conveys Lanzmann’s interest in another kind of transition, that between shockingly different worlds. We see this clash from different perspectives, enabled by the juxtapositions of editing, whether trains are the literal or metaphorical vehicle. While Vrba unloaded people from the trains at Auschwitz, Bomba was dragged out of one at Treblinka; Deutschkron lived in hiding in Berlin throughout the war, while Suchomel in the adjoining interview recounts how he was sent from Berlin to work at Treblinka; Franz Schalling mentions letting the Jewish work detail at Chelmno out of their cells to clean up after a gassing, and in the next interview

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Podchlebnik gives the reverse perspective of a member of the Chelmno detail who heard the victims’ screams dying away to silence. The omnipresence of trains conveys Lanzmann’s concern to represent the deportees’ suffering during their transit to death, and this is shown by his questions to bystanders and survivors about the weather, the seasons, whether or not local people offered water to those in the cattle cars, his interviews with those from Corfu who had to travel the furthest, as well as questions about the detail of genocidal bureacracy that he puts to Raul Hilberg, who reveals that the victims paid for their own journeys. Children were not charged, and so, as Lanzmann puts it, ‘had the privilege’ to be gassed for free. Lanzmann questions the fantastical-seeming insistence from bystanders that ‘foreign Jews’ travelled to the camps in passenger carriages and played cards en route; he lets one sequence end with the words of Czeslaw Borowi about a ‘foreign Jew’ who was left behind at a station and ‘ran after the train’. While such an observation seems fancifully tendentious, in its black irony it chimes with the final remark from Paula Biren about surviving in hiding and ‘avoiding the destiny of my people’, thus emphasising the communal nature of this tragedy. Yet Lanzmann insists that the detail about Jews arriving at death camps in passenger trains is historically accurate, and an indicator of how the victims’ experiences changed at different times. Lastly, Filip Müller describes the reliance of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando on trainloads of victims destined for extermination: ‘We in the Sonderkommando knew that a lack of trains would lead to our liquidation.’ In a horrible reversal, the death trains meant life for some. Shoah is so rich in terms of dialogue and mise en scène that drawing out any particular patterns may be at the expense of others, but those established by the editing seem both clear and sometimes deliberately arbitrary, focusing on a detail which is striking or concrete rather than historically central. In this way Lanzmann follows the dictum Hilberg gives voice to in Shoah: ‘I never began with the big questions because I feared inadequate answers.’

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3 Archive Footage Lanzmann decided at the very beginning of his project that he would not include in his film archival footage or photography. Viewing such films as Frédéric Rossif’s The Time of the Ghetto (1961), a compilation of material filmed by the Nazis that was originally intended as propaganda, showed Lanzmann the dangers of presenting such imagery without making clear to its spectators the sources of such apparently incontestable documentary evidence. Almost nothing of this kind appears in Shoah. One of the few exceptions seems to occur at the film’s end, when a sequence about the doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising opens on a black-and-white image of the devastated city that fills the screen. After a few seconds, however, the camera pulls back to reveal that this is part of a display

At the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum

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in the Lohamei Hagettaot (Ghetto Fighters’) Kibbutz Museum, at which the interviewees, Simcha Rottem and Itzhak Zuckermann, are looking. The camera movement emphasises the fact that this photograph is an object rather than an image. It is shown as part of a memorial and not for the sake of information or illustration, and serves as a trigger for the witnesses’ recall and for Zuckermann’s opening words, uttered off-screen as we see a close-up of his face: ‘Claude, you asked for my impression. If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.’ But for the most part, Shoah focuses on the past only as it makes itself felt in the present – at least, in the present time of the film in the 1970s and 80s. So important is this project of ‘reincarnation’,57 both audibly and visibly, that Lanzmann made it the central criterion when deciding what to include during the process of editing Shoah. For instance, Lanzmann describes how he experienced both ‘horror’ and the realisation that Suchomel’s was an ‘If you could lick my heart, it would poison you’

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‘extraordinary testimony’ on seeing that, as he sang, the former guard ‘was entirely taken over again by his past’ (‘reassaisi’). He says of Bomba, the survivor of Treblinka, that his tears were ‘incarnation itself’.58 Lanzmann’s objection to archival material is thus both philosophical and aesthetic. His defence of this stance has led to lively debate among critics and other film-makers. It has gained the aesthetic significance for Holocaust film, and the representation of atrocity more widely, of that surrounding Theodor Adorno’s apparently proscriptive statement about literature, ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Lanzmann has set himself against other film-makers, including Jean-Luc Godard, who argue for the inclusion of such imagery in their films. Godard’s Histoires du cinéma (1988–98) features not only footage from the liberation of Belsen but from Shoah itself, which has in turn taken on the status of archive material; and Spielberg, whose recreation of scenes from Auschwitz in Schindler’s List Lanzmann has called a ‘fabrication of archives’.59 Lanzmann states that his project is precisely to ‘replace’ the imagery of the gas chambers, not because it is ‘missing’, but because it would be ‘obscene’ to show it.60 According to Lanzmann, had footage of ‘three thousand people dying together in a gas chamber’ come to light, ‘I would never have included this in my film. I would have preferred to destroy it.’61 Instead of viewing the dead as objectified victims in library imagery, Lanzmann’s project allows, or forces, us to visualise the gas chambers as if from within. As Shoshana Felman argues, such a viewpoint is consistently contrasted in Shoah with an external one, typified by Frau Michelson’s words about the gas vans: ‘I never looked inside … I only saw things from the outside.’62 Müller’s direct quotation of the voices of the dead marks an astonishing moment of reincarnation, experienced this time by the spectator: ‘I heard “fachowitz”, meaning “skilled worker”. And “Malach-ha-Mawis”, which means “the angel of death” in Yiddish. Also, “harginnen”: “they’re going to kill us”.’ As Müller says, the ‘conflicted words’, about work, religion and death, reveal the

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‘conflicted feelings’ of the victims – words which we astonishingly hear again as he recalls them. Another such view from inside the machinery of death is unexpectedly offered in a secret letter sent to the SS officer Walter Rauff in June 1942 by the un-aptly named Willy Just, about improving the gas vans at Chelmno. Lanzmann reads out the letter, in French, accompanied by a long tracking shot of the industrial landscape of the Ruhr Valley.63 Although the letter names the victims in the most objectified and distanced way imaginable, as ‘pieces’, ‘merchandise’ and ‘load’, it also describes how the Jews reacted to being locked in the interior of the vans in a way that horrifyingly almost recreates their own viewpoint: they are afraid of the darkness and rush towards the doors. The apparent mismatch in this sequence between what we see and what we hear generates uncomfortable meaning. The letter concerns industrial murder while the image-track shows the details of heavy industry typical of ‘developed’ nations; we The Ruhr Valley

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The gas van today

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see billowing steam, chimneys and a flue belching flame. The implied connection between soundtrack and image is made clear at last when Lanzmann reads this line from the letter: ‘As for the ten vehicles ordered from Saurer, they must be equipped with all innovations.’ At this moment we see, filmed from the back window of a moving vehicle, the grille of the van behind, followed by a close-up on its badge and mudflaps, both of which read ‘Saurer’. Today’s version of the death van travels along beside the industrial complex and the filming van, implying perhaps that industrial values may be inhumanly misapplied. Throughout Shoah Lanzmann asks questions not only about the processes of mass killing but how ‘improvements’ and developments occurred, to the gas vans and to the crematoria and ramp at Auschwitz, as if to demonstrate the long and elaborate history of perfecting industrial-scale destruction that was the Holocaust. But, most strikingly, the close-up on the Saurer van reveals the persistence of the past in the present. This time, it is an ominous persistence. The victims ‘will not reappear’, in Hilberg’s phrase, but the van has never left. Lanzmann’s refusal to use either archival imagery, or the kind of ‘recreation’ that characterises Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List as well as such films as Conspiracy (Frank Pierson, 2001), which dramatises the Wannsee Conference, is a specifically filmic decision about the use of certain kinds of image. As Lanzmann sternly observes, ‘everything I refrained from showing in Shoah is shown by Spielberg’, including the interior of the gas chambers and the reopening of mass graves.64 Lanzmann contrasts the ending of Shoah with that of Schindler’s List, in which the real-life ‘Schindler Jews’ in the present place stones on Schindler’s grave in Jerusalem. Shoah ends with a train endlessly travelling in the dusk. Rather than the suggestion of redemption either by an individual or by the state of Israel, Shoah concludes with the melancholy visual suggestion of the endless unrolling of the Holocaust’s legacy. The implication of Lanzmann’s refusal to include archival imagery in Shoah is often taken to be that he considers the Holocaust

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itself can never be adequately represented, that it is beyond written or filmed representation to the extent that it is almost subject to a filmic version of the biblical Second Commandment, or Bilderverbot, forbidding the creation and worship of graven images.65 This biblical proscription has been interpreted in Jewish law as a prohibition on showing any human or animal imagery in the context of religious buildings and books. Critics of Lanzmann’s argument against certain kinds of filmic representation imply that he has been affected by the irrational and even superstitious aspect of such a religious prohibition, both on his own account and because of his dogmatism in promulgating this view. For instance, Jacques Rancière argues against Lanzmann’s view in these terms: ‘There is no property of the event which prohibits representation … there are only choices.’66 In practice, this is of course so. Lanzmann’s praise of Jonathan Littell’s 2008 novel The Kindly Ones about an Einsatzgruppen officer shows that he does not oppose Holocaust representation or fiction per se, but is making a typically uncompromising statement about filmmaking. We may well share this distaste for the widespread reproduction of photographs or footage of atrocity, which can be presented as prompts for emotive or prurient effect, or for commercial purposes on book jackets and posters. On the other hand, archive imagery can be a powerful inspiration for such works as Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz’s autobiographical meditation The Final Station: Umschlagplatz (1994), a book which centres on but does not reproduce the photograph of the arrest of the small boy in the Warsaw Ghetto; and the artist Lorie Novak’s montage which includes photographs of her own childhood juxtaposed with images of Anne Frank.67

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4 ‘Reincarnating’ the Past Shoah shows the traces of the past in the present – or, as Lanzmann has phrased it, the ‘traces of traces’.68 This is part of Lanzmann’s project to prevent the Holocaust being consigned to the dead realm of history, and to undo the Nazis’ wish to prevent victims warning each other, to camouflage and then remove any sign of their crimes, as Bomba puts it of the gassing of a group of 2,000 people at Treblinka: ‘And in no time this was as clean as though people had never been on that place. There was no trace, none at all, like a magic thing, everything disappeared.’ The traces in Shoah take several forms, including landscapes, songs, documents, such as letters and Nazi orders, and witnesses who quote the voices of the dead or speak of the past in the present tense. In an uncanny reversal of such reincarnation, there are also moments in which the present is compared to the past, as if the present moment too were infected by deathliness. This is often the result of Lanzmann’s insistent questions about the details of size, number, duration and extent. For instance, in response to Lanzmann’s request that Franz Schalling ‘describe the gas vans’ at Chelmno, the latter uses a comparison with the current setting: ‘they stretched, say, from here to the window’. Suchomel equally eerily claims that the ‘funnel’ to the gas chambers at Treblinka was ‘about thirteen feet wide, as wide as this room’, a comparison to which Lanzmann draws attention by confirming the extent with a wide sweep of his arms, as if the ‘funnel’ were present in ghostly form. In both cases, it is as if the interview were actually taking place inside the machinery of death that has been conjured up by memory. Similarly, Lanzmann finds himself standing within the perimeter of the now barely visible death camp at Sobibor, which Jan Piwonski, formerly the ‘assistant switchman’ for the railway, recreates through his description. Yet when the buildings are still standing, Lanzmann and the camera remain on the outside to signal

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the fact that such a journey can only be re-enacted in memory: they do not enter the gateway at Auschwitz to the Birkenau ramp. Most significantly, the testifiers themselves are traces of the past, in terms of what they say about that past but also in terms of how the past speaks through them. At such moments, the witness seems to undergo a collapse of temporal boundaries, and at the same time the spectator experiences a closing of the gap between the mise en scène and the scenes of the past that they can only imagine. Lanzmann calls this effect ‘reincarnation’: it does not suggest a return to the past, as in the kind of inert memory which Lanzmann has said ‘horrifies me’,69 but a return of the past, as we will see in Lanzmann’s encounter with Franz Suchomel. Franz Suchomel As spectators, we have already heard from Suchomel about his experience as a guard at Treblinka when we see the fourth episode of Lanzmann’s encounter with him at the beginning of the ‘second

The aerial searches for a signal

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epoch’ of Shoah: the epoch of the gas chambers’ interior. This time the sequence opens on an acousmatic voice, that is, one whose origin we cannot identify, singing a song about Treblinka. At the same time we see a quiet, sunny street, and a slow zoom towards the parked VW filming van culminates in a close-up on the van’s rooftop aerial as it moves and turns in search of a signal from the concealed paluche camera. The very nature of the aerial’s questing movement puts us in mind of the perennial search in Shoah for traces of the past. At the moment Lanzmann asks Suchomel to sing the ‘Treblinka song’ for a second time – ‘It’s very important. But loud!’ – there is a cut to Suchomel’s face, in a big close-up which has the characteristic scratchy black-and-white look of images captured by the hidden camera. In his autobiography Lanzmann describes the ‘sudden hardness’ of the former guard’s eyes as he sang, signalling his bodily return to a time past,70 and the spectator can clearly see a fortuitous black band that runs waveringly across Suchomel’s eyes as if to

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highlight this. Although there is a stark contrast in this sequence between the colour footage of the van and of present-day Treblinka and the black-and-white footage of the interview, this does not convey a clash between past and present, as it does in Resnais’ Night and Fog. In Shoah both kinds of film stock represent the present alone. Suchomel’s twofold rendition of the ‘Treblinka song’ is in itself a reincarnation: he sings word-perfectly in the present just as he did in the past. The close fit between the time of this ‘agreeable, rotund’71 old man, and the time of the young Treblinka guard he once was, is conveyed not only by the transformation of Suchomel’s nostalgia into reincarnation, but also in the choice of location. During the encounter with Suchomel we see three different places: the secretly shot film of Suchomel indoors, footage from the filming van’s interior and panning shots of present-day Treblinka. As Suchomel describes the camp’s layout – ‘At the top of the slope was the gas chamber’ – the camera concludes an aerial pan of the memorial at Treblinka and returns to ground level. In front of the spectator is a grassy slope

The site of the gas chambers at Treblinka

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surmounted by a large stone monument marking the gas chambers’ location. We know that the camera’s slow, relentless glide will take us up to this slope, however much we may wish it would not, and as it does so, Suchomel continues, ‘You had to climb up to it.’ His return to the past is accompanied by the camera’s approach to its location, allowing the spectator to ‘inhabit the viewpoint of those who were going to die’.72

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5 Mise en scène Lanzmann has entered into a debate with Jean-Luc Godard, initially about the citation of archive material in film, which has expanded to address film-making more generally. Where Lanzmann claimed that in the unlikely event of film footage of the gas chambers coming to light he would destroy it, Godard insisted that a good researcher could locate this ‘missing reel’, and accused Lanzmann of following Adorno’s role in forbidding certain kinds of Holocaust representation. Godard has observed of Shoah that its failure is that the spectator sees ‘nothing’, and that Lanzmann is interested in dialogue at the expense of mise en scène. In a provocative comparison of Lanzmann with the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the film critic Libby Saxton echoes this notion in her argument that the former privileges word over image, and gives priority to ‘oral over visual modes of access to the past’.73 However, although it is true that the spectator does not see the atrocities of the past, and that dialogue is crucial to Lanzmann’s film, I would argue that we do indeed ‘visually access’ the past in Shoah and that dialogue is always meaningfully set against the imagery of people and places. Along with the editing of film footage to constitute the film’s final version, Lanzmann has ensured that many sequences end with a meticulously chosen utterance that links to the next movement or completes its meaning. For instance, Suchomel’s description of disposing of the bodies at Treblinka concludes, ‘With rubbish, paper and gasoline, people burn very well’; while Müller’s account of how the Nazis kept those about to be gassed at Auschwitz calm, by getting them to undress on the pretext that they would be ‘disinfected’, concludes, ‘By this device a great leap forward had been made! Now the clothing could be used.’ However, visual transitions between

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interviews and sequences are at least as significant as verbal ones, and Shoah’s project of representing traces and resurrections is fully dependent upon what we see, and often upon the gulf between what we hear about the past and what we witness of the present. Given such a gulf, what we do see is even more important. For instance, at the film’s opening, Simon Srebnik is punted in a boat down the Narew River, heading first towards the right of the frame as he sings in Polish, then returns from the left as we hear him sing in German.74 This apparently simple movement re-enacts Srebnik’s remarkable survival and its basis in the strange exchange of songs: he taught the Nazi guards Polish folk songs, and in return they taught him German drinking songs. The scene also has the look of a latter-day version of Charon, the figure from Greek mythology, ferrying the souls of the dead to Hades across the River Styx. Such a notion of descending from life to hell is a powerful Holocaust trope, and Primo Levi describes his entry into Auschwitz in the care of a guard whose theft of the prisoners’ valuables was a ‘small private initiative of our Charon’.75 In the secretly filmed encounter with Franz Schalling, formerly a guard at Chelmno, we see a sequence that both conveys and symbolises the importance of the image in Shoah. Before we see Schalling’s face, we hear the beginning of his conversation with Lanzmann. What we are shown is the interior of the VW filming van as it picks up the signal from the hidden camera, and flickering lines across a tiny screen: the cameraman inside the van is in the act of seeking an image. We see the image come into being as it settles, emphasising and symbolising the fact that the soundtrack alone is not enough; a tiny image of Schalling talking to Lanzmann is visible on the monitor in the van, which then fills the screen. This watery blue two-shot of Schalling and Lanzmann also includes a partial view of Schalling’s wife, who is sitting just in front of the concealed camera’s viewfinder. In interview, Lanzmann has responded with outrage to the idea that Shoah might have consisted only of words, and furnished a book rather than a film: ‘What an idiotic idea!’ He expands on this outburst to say that the film is formed from ‘material

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which could not be accommodated in any other register. Faces, trees, nature … Shoah is an incarnation.’76 In other words, such embodiment or incarnation of the past can only be cinematic. This is especially clear in those instances where it was indeed reading a book that inspired Lanzmann’s invitation to an interview, such as Jan Karski’s 1944 account of Polish resistance, Story of a Secret State. In this memoir Karski describes several of the episodes of which we hear in Shoah. We read about his witnessing random shootings by Hitler Youth boys, how one of the Jewish leaders he met could have ‘passed easily’ for a Polish nobleman, and how the children apparently playing in the Warsaw Ghetto were actually just engaged in ‘make-believe’ games.77 Yet when Karski writes in description of the two Jewish leaders about the way in which ‘the torrents of their emotion broke over me’,78 we are not witness to the extraordinary moment of reincarnation and re-embodiment that takes place as he conveys this moment in Shoah. When Karski says in Shoah of the Jewish leaders, ‘they were breaking down’, we see him Searching for an image

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break down too, not just in sympathy but in a rekindling of the tears of these dead men. Likewise, in the introduction to his edition of The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, Hilberg draws attention to the very instances he describes in Shoah, but the effect is entirely different. It is one thing to read the story of the woman singer who so loved an actor that when he was grievously wounded she tried to push his organs back inside his body, and then, when he died, buried him with her own hands.79 It is another to hear this tale narrated in Hilberg’s voice – his Austrian accent overlaid by an American one – as the camera pans around the overgrown Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. The sequence concludes on a close-up of Hilberg’s face with its customary quizzical expression, as if he is keeping emotion strictly at bay. Once more we witness a version of re-embodiment. It is only of the filmic version, not of his written introduction to the diary, that Lanzmann could say to Hilberg, ‘You are Czerniakow.’80 As Wieviorka comments of her plan to compare the testimonies of Raul Hilberg quotes Adam Czerniakow’s diary

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Srebnik and Podchlebnik in Shoah with those they gave at the 1961 Eichmann trial, this is a ‘pointless’ exercise precisely because of the loss of the interviewees’ ‘voices and faces’ when reading the trial transcripts.81 It does not matter that in the cases of Karski and Hilberg material already in the public domain is repeated in Shoah. It is not novelty nor new information that Lanzmann seeks in his film, but a bodily staging. Abraham Bomba Despite Godard’s argument, dialogue and the image in Shoah are inseparable. This is clear in the interview with Abraham Bomba, where what we see both supports and clashes with what the retired barber says. The ‘staging’ of this interview is obvious at once, due to the intertitle identifying Israel as the location, and the difference between Bomba’s grim story of slave labour at Treblinka, and the sunny barber’s shop interior peopled by barbers in yellow- or bluecheck uniforms. Yet even the sunshine restages the horror of what

The staged barber’s shop

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Bomba relates. We recall his description of it as just ‘Jewish luck’ that Poland experienced a heatwave in September 1942 when the cattle train in which he was travelling stood stationary for hours en route to Treblinka. However, as in the case of all the stagings in Shoah, the extent of the fictional setting is not made explicit. The Tel Aviv barber’s shop was hired for the purposes of filming, while Bomba’s ‘customer’, whose hair is used as a prop, was a friend of his from Czestochowa who did not speak English.82 During the interview Lanzmann draws attention to the staged location by verifying that at Treblinka Bomba used scissors, just as we see him do in the present; the action of cutting both enacts the past (‘Can you show me how you did it?’ Lanzmann asks) and gives Bomba a refuge from it.83 When Bomba relates that in Treblinka he wanted to give the women ‘the imagination that they’re getting a nice haircut’, so we see him repeat this ‘imagination’ in the present with his ‘customer’.84 Yet the details of the staging are also significantly different from the past. The ‘customers’ in the present are all men, fitting Bomba’s trade as a barber. To have shown Bomba cutting women’s hair in the present as he did at Treblinka would, in Lanzmann’s view, have been another ‘obscenity’. Lanzmann’s question during this interview about hair-cutting in the camp, ‘there were no mirrors?’, also draws attention to the differences between past and present. In the present the barber’s shop mirrors stand on facing walls, reflecting an infinite regress. The first shot of Bomba in the sequence is a reflection, although we only realise this when the camera tracks around to focus on him. The camera is never still for long during this encounter, at times showing Bomba from behind, making a 360 tracking shot around him, filming his face in reflection bisected by the seam in the mirror – yet the camera itself is not reflected, making the mirrors seem even less naturalistic and emphasising the difficulty of capturing Bomba’s story. Precisely because of the elaborate set-up, we are mindful that it exists for the sake of a one-time reincarnation of the past; as Lanzmann puts it, ‘I filmed in the empire of the instant, there could

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be no retake or second chance.’85 During this sequence in which the camera is invisible, we do not see Lanzmann either; his presence is signalled only by his voice and by Bomba’s infrequent glances towards him off-screen, for instance when the barber pleads, ‘Don’t make me go on.’ Bomba never catches the spectator’s look in an eyeline match, and indeed his gaze is directed either down towards the man whose hair he cuts, or away out of shot, as if he can only summon up the past by turning away from the sights of the present. Bomba breaks down when his account of Treblinka turns to the personal, and his voice likewise changes from a public, declamatory style to a quiet, private one: ‘I won’t be able to do it.’ Some viewers have speculated that Bomba’s story of a ‘friend’ who also worked as a barber and whose ‘wife and sister came into the gas chamber’ is a displaced story about himself. In this way it may follow a narrative thread throughout Shoah about the Jews who were forced to work for the Germans coming so close to death that they saw the bodies of their own families, as Zaïdel does in the mass grave at Ponari, and Podchlebnik in the gas vans at Chelmno. It is here that the threatened return of the past interrupts Bomba’s account: ‘I can’t. It’s too horrible.’ There follows a long silence in which Bomba is shown in what seems like a relentless close-up, struggling to compose himself, while Lanzmann’s urging, ‘We have to do it … We must go on,’ signals the shared nature of the The mirrors’ infinite regress

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enterprise. There follows an astonishing moment of return to the past that relies entirely on the combination of what we see and what we hear. Bomba steadies himself by continuing his description of what happened to the women’s hair, still in his quiet, private voice: ‘I told you today it’s going to be very hard. They were taking that in bags and transporting it to Germany.’ He then bends over the man whose hair he is cutting and mutters the sentence about the bags in Yiddish, the language of his former life, almost inaudibly: the words do not appear in the published English text of the film,86 nor has any critic commented on them. These words do not seem to be addressed to the man in the barber’s chair, whose face remains impassive, but as if to an invisible interlocutor in the past – or perhaps to the past itself. Throughout, Bomba refers both to the location and the time of the camp as ‘over there’, and it is Lanzmann’s achievement to have made these geographical and temporal boundaries vanish. Repeating the words in Yiddish constitutes the moment of Bomba’s being taken over by the past, just as his recovery and return – ‘Okay. Go on’ – can only be signalled in the English of his post-war life. These extraordinary moments of breakdown and return constitute some of the most visible and audible enactments of the past in Shoah. They enable Bomba to gather himself together and continue in his declamatory voice, eyes lowered, to describe the meeting between the barber and his family at the gas chamber: ‘They tried to talk to him.’ Jan Karski The interview in Shoah with Jan Karski relies on the same interdependence of visual and aural material as that with Bomba in its representation of a painful reliving of the past. Karski’s struggle to remain composed – his lips tremble, he breathes deeply, his face twitches and his colour changes – is evident throughout the encounter with Lanzmann, who is only briefly visible, and silent for long stretches. Indeed, Yannick Haenel argues that Lanzmann’s achievement here is precisely to film silence.87 However, it is clear

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that Lanzmann’s questions not only help to clarify what Karski is describing (the naked bodies lying in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto were indeed ‘corpses’) but to bring his recall into the present. Unlike the case of Bomba, it is not as a result of Lanzmann’s questioning that Karski weeps but because of the pressure of his own past. Karski breaks down twice, once at the very beginning of the interview and again towards the end, but the two moments seem to have a different psychic meaning. The first time, as I have noted, Karski leaves his chair and goes out of shot abruptly. His return to the living-room and to the past is anticipated by his words (‘I come back’) and by the camera, which cuts quickly to a different angle on the room: there is a long shot of the corridor down which Karski then walks back. In a reverse long shot we see Lanzmann still seated; he is joined by Karski and at first their conversation is filmed from the corridor vantage point. It is as if the camera is maintaining a decorous and hesitant distance, returning only when Karski explains Karski’s empty chair

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that he will ‘try to do it’, that is, return to the past, but only because he understands the film is ‘for the historical record’. And it is indeed as if, after this point, Karski abandons such meta-comment on the film’s creation and is drawn into a vanished world. Like Bomba, his gaze is most often directed downwards, out of shot, as if towards an unseen region of the past. Only occasionally does he look at Lanzmann directly, usually to emphasise a small factual point, and never at the camera. He abandons reported speech and does not so much quote the two Jewish leaders whom he met in Warsaw as let their voices, their intonation and urgency, speak through him. Even personal pronouns and verbal tenses merge, as Karski speaks the Bund leader’s words about his prediction that the Allies would win the war: ‘What good will it do us?’ This blended ‘us’ remarkably unites victim and bystander, Jew and Pole, in an utterance not only of identification but of revivification. Karski’s sympathetic ventriloquism of the Bund leader also blends together past and present: ‘Perhaps they don’t know it!’ is an anguished cry about the ignorance of genocide on the part of the Allies and the spectator alike; while ‘Do you understand it? Do you understand it?’ and ‘Remember this, remember this!’ are demands made both to Karski in 1942, and by him to the viewer in the present.88 The second time Karski breaks down, it seems to be inspired by his description of a pair of Hitler Youth boys walking through the Ghetto, before whom the Jews scatter in terror. One of the youths, ‘without even thinking’, randomly shoots out a window; here, the destruction of a window signifies a horrifying refusal to see brutality and suffering for what they are. It is the words about his own witness, ‘I was paralysed,’ that prompt Karski’s tears, which are, as Lanzmann said of Bomba’s, ‘incarnation itself’. This time, Karski regains his composure almost at once, showing that tears in Shoah, like song, are the bodily being of the traumatic past, a constant presence always waiting to burst forth. Karski’s encounter with Lanzmann is in one sense the recall of failed action. Although Karski went from being a blind bystander – ‘I did not see many things’ – to

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learning secondhand from the Jewish leaders and then seeing for himself, the transmission of his witness to the Allies and American Jewish leaders did not halt the extermination programme; his role remained, ironically, spectatorial. The present-day footage of cityscapes that is interleaved with Karski’s words represents this cinematically. But in the present he delivers once more the warning messages and invocations of those who died, to prevent the second oblivion of forgetting. As in the interview with Bomba, the interview with Karski has a raw, unpolished look, relying on abrupt cuts and intrusive closeups followed by tracks out. Unlike the barber shop interview, however, that with Karski cuts away to panning shots, some taken with a hand-held camera, of the ‘locations’ of his story in the USA, Germany and Warsaw while we continue to hear his voice. At first it seems that we are looking at the view out of Karski’s window in Washington, DC, but what we see is New York’s Statue of Liberty – just as Karski relates that a Jewish Bund leader in Warsaw urged him to ‘approach as many people as possible’, including Americans, with the news of genocide. But despite the raw and enigmatic look of this interview, the signs of meticulous editing are always present, for instance in the way that external noise – American aeroplanes, Polish trams – is fitted into the gaps of Karski’s narration and does not drown it out; and what he says is matched, although not illustrated, by this footage of the outside world. As Yannick Haenel argues, the meaning of the counterpoint between Karski’s voice and the Statue of Liberty is overdetermined, both celebrating Karski’s own liberty and lamenting its loss in wartime Europe. The movement of the camera helps the spectator’s interpretation: while Karski speaks ‘in the place’ of the Jewish leaders – ‘We have contributed to humanity. We are human’ – a backwards zoom slowly shrinks the Statue until it is no more than a ‘derisory figurine lost in the middle of the water’, its iconic power lost.89 Later, as Karski speaks we see footage of ruins in present-day Warsaw. Here, the camera zooms in on the name of a road to

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construct a similar irony that goes untranslated: we read ‘Wolnos´c´’ (‘freedom’). When Karski quotes the plea of the Jewish Bund leader in the Warsaw Ghetto that the Allies should use their planes to help the Jews, we see a jet fly over the New York skyline. When he quotes the Bund leader’s cry to the Jews of America, ‘Their people are dying!’, this is accompanied by a long, slow close-up of debris on the train-track at Auschwitz. What looks like leaves from a distance turns out to be hundreds of rusty, bent spoons and forks, and in turn this cutlery takes on the look of piled-up bodies. Such footage has an oblique rather than a direct relation of either pathos or irony to Karski’s narration. In some ways the footage gives ‘answers’ to the dilemmas of the past. Karski’s eye-witness reports of the Ghetto did not ‘shake the conscience of the world’, the Allies did not deploy their Liberty; Freedom; The site of the Ghetto; A window onto the past

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planes on the Jews’ behalf, the majority of whom died in Auschwitz or other camps. But what we are shown is, once more, simply ‘traces of traces’ in the present. This is especially true when the present-day footage appears most closely to follow Karski’s story of the past. As he describes the secret entrance he used to get into the Ghetto, through a ‘building not inhabited by anybody’, we are shown just such a derelict old building, standing alone in wasteland amid new communist-era apartment blocks. Another slow, gradual close-up reveals its enamel sign: 40 Nowolipki Street, formerly one of the Ghetto thoroughfares. A present-day trace can also do duty as a trope. When Karski relates how he entered the Ghetto through a tunnel, the hand-held camera enacts a similar movement through an empty window-frame. But while the spectator of Shoah sees only a roofless, weed-infested ruined space on the other side of the window in the present, Karski pauses on the brink of the tunnel into the Ghetto in the past and of his story in the present to confirm with Lanzmann, ‘Now comes the description of it, yes?’ As spectators, we hear but do not see the place of which Karski says, ‘It was not a world. There was not humanity,’ except in imagination spurred on by his words. Yet, despite its naturalistic look – Karski is interviewed at home, and we hear his dog panting and shaking itself out of frame – this interview is just as staged as Bomba’s in its placing of its subject in a symbolic setting. Karski sits in a peaceful, book-lined apartment in Washington, DC, dressed elegantly in a suit and tie, with a handkerchief in his jacket pocket, almost as if he too had the look of the ‘Polish nobleman’ to whom he likens the Bund leader. He speaks in a careful, formal, accented English, the counterpart to Bomba’s public, declamatory voice. In this way Karski’s wartime role as courier for the Polish government-in-exile is reprised, and the eruption of the past takes place shockingly within this sedate setting. In both these remarkable encounters, the spectator of Shoah is a witness to a collapse of temporal boundaries in which the past

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overtakes a testifier in the present. These moments depend on both image and dialogue, and the complex relationship between them, in a film that, following Freud’s logic of Nachträglichkeit, or belatedness, shows only the traumatised witness and not the traumatic event itself. Karski conveys his shock at witnessing the Ghetto by reference to representation: ‘I never saw such things, I never … nobody ever wrote about this kind of reality. I never saw any theatre, I never saw any movie … this was not the world.’ As he says this, the spectator realises with a shock of recognition that, in Shoah, we are seeing that movie.

Jan Karski

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6 Lanzmann as Interviewer Lanzmann’s role in Shoah is not the intra-diegetic and spectatorfacing one of, for instance, David Attenborough in Life on Earth (BBC2, 1979), nor does he take up a combination of roles like that offered by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine (2002), in which Moore alternates between a direct address to camera and assuming the role of faux-naif interviewer within the diegesis. Rather, Lanzmann assumes a performative role90 that alters with every encounter, to the extent that he is sometimes absent or invisible during an interview, at other times part of a sequence-long two-shot. Lanzmann describes, as if from the point of view of an actor, his different approach to the varied categories of interviewee: ‘it is unimaginable that I could have addressed the Jewish, Polish and German protagonists in the same manner’, and acknowledges that his approach also altered case by case.91 We see, for instance, his ambivalent amusement at the confession by Polish villagers that they loved the now-vanished ‘little Jewesses’; his shock tactics to try to get Josef Oberhauser, formerly a guard at Belzec, to speak: ‘Mr Oberhauser! Do you remember Belzec? No memories of Belzec? Of the overflowing graves? You don’t remember?’; and, most famously, his insistence that Bomba continue to describe his experiences at Treblinka even when the former barber says he cannot. It is in the outtakes of Shoah that we see Lanzmann’s most extreme performance as interviewer. Several critics, and Lanzmann himself, regret the absence from Shoah of any interviewees from the wartime Einsatzgruppen squads. These were security units who followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union during the invasion in June 1941, and in that guise murdered 1.3 million Jews and others, including gypsies, the mentally ill and communist officials. The murders took the form of ‘exceptionally brutal’92 mass shootings that were

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committed in public, often involving local auxiliaries. Yet Lanzmann did conduct two such interviews. As well as the fact that both the Einsatzgruppen interviews are short and do not progress beyond preliminaries, Lanzmann omitted them from Shoah because they do not fit the film’s historical or filmic pattern. The Einsatzgruppen atrocities were not ‘industrialised’ murders by gassing, involving long and arduous journeys to special camps, but ad hoc mass shootings that took place usually within walking distance of the victims’ homes. Lanzmann recorded two interviews, one with Heinz Schubert of Einsatzgruppe D, whose death sentence handed down at Nuremberg was later commuted; and one with Karl Kretschmer, lately of Einsatzgruppe C, who had been acquitted at trial in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1968 for lack of evidence. While Schubert was a ‘desk murderer’93 who oversaw but did not take part in mass killings, Kretschmer was a hands-on shooter whose extraordinary letters home to his family in Berlin about his experiences have become notorious for their mixture of atrocity, to which the reader sees him gradually become accustomed, and sentimentality. For instance, he wrote from Ukraine in autumn 1942, ‘But you can trust your Daddy. He thinks about you all the time and is not shooting immoderately’; while an assurance that his wife Sonja need not worry about the adequacy of his clothing is followed by the observation, ‘We can get everything here. The clothes belonged to people who are no longer alive today.’94 Lanzmann conducted both interviews clandestinely with the microphone-sized camera used elsewhere in Shoah, but in Schubert’s case the interview ends abruptly and dramatically when he discovers he is being recorded and his sons launch an assault on Lanzmann and his translator. Despite this dangerous precedent, Lanzmann puts to Karl Kretschmer the sardonic, polemical questions viewers will always have wanted to ask a former Nazi but were too afraid to ask: whether Kretschmer is still an antisemite; what does he think today about the extermination of the Jews? How could small children have been shot as saboteurs? Was Kretschmer a father at the time? Factual answers are not what Lanzmann seeks. Indeed, from

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the evidence of Kretschmer’s letters, he is perfectly aware that the former Nazi was the father of young children in 1942 at the time he was engaged in mass shootings in the Crimea. Nor does Lanzmann seek to probe the psychology of the former Nazis he interviews,95 but to prompt their performative enactments of the past. Because of the particular circumstances of the encounter, in which Lanzmann is safe outside Kretschmer’s house but his interviewee keeps threatening to retreat back inside, the questions are attention-grabbing and aggressively loaded: LANZMANN

Would you let your daughter marry a Jew?

KRETSCHMER

What a question! She’s married to a Swiss fellow.

LANZMANN

Ah, Swiss … that will be a lot quieter [than a Jew].96

Here Lanzmann acts out a pair of stereotypes to parody Kretschmer’s own reliance on them: that, as a former SS officer, he would fear miscegenation, and that Jews are not ‘quiet’ (‘ruhig’). He does not seek information, but a performance to match his own. In his approaches to former Nazis, Lanzmann’s performance is staged. He wrote letters to thirty former Nazis requesting interviews in the persona of one Claude-Marie Sorel, in whose name he had obtained a false passport, purporting to be from the ‘Centre for the Study and Research of Contemporary History’ at the University of

‘Would you let your daughter marry a Jew?’

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Paris, where he claimed that an archive of oral histories was being compiled. ‘Sorel’ gave as his home address that of Les Temps modernes office.97 Dr Sorel is most consistently present in the encounter with Heinz Schubert in the outtakes, and in Shoah in the interview with Walter Stier, who agreed to a meeting with this ‘historian’ to tell him how the Reichsbahn had managed to carry out its work during the war.98 Sorel is a figure who shares a surname with Stendhal’s protagonist in Le rouge et le noir, and with Georges Sorel, a nineteenth-century French revolutionary. Most crucially, however, as well as these fitting echoes, ‘Claude-Marie Sorel’ replaces with a hint at Catholicism the Jewish origins which, according to Lanzmann, would be ‘manifest’ for Germans on hearing his own surname.99 While the interview with Kretschmer from the outtakes represents an extreme performance on Lanzmann’s part, traces of its bracingly ironic tone are audible in Shoah in his encounters with other former Nazis. Simply allowing to stand the breathtakingly deluded remarks of Franz Grassler – ‘May I take notes?’ he asks when told that Adam Czerniakow’s diary has been published; and of Walter Stier, who acts out an amnesia over the name of ‘that camp: what was its name? It was in the Oppeln district … I’ve got it: Auschwitz!’, itself implies a sceptical view. It is one that Lanzmann gives voice to directly as well. Having sung the ‘Treblinka song’, Suchomel observes, ‘We’re laughing about it, but it’s so sad!’ to which Lanzmann gives an unamused retort: ‘No one’s laughing.’ Franz Grassler and Raul Hilberg By a consummate feat of editing, Lanzmann’s interview with Jan Karski is followed by an encounter with Franz Grassler, who had been deputy to Heinz Auerswald, the Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in the Warsaw Ghetto. The interview is broken up into small sequences which are crosscut with an equally fragmented interview with the Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg. Hilberg takes on a similar, counterpointing role in the interview with Walter Stier, whose evasions about his knowledge of where the ‘special’ trains were going

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during the war are juxtaposed with the historian’s detailed reading of the 10,000 or more deaths implicit in a single train timetable. In the interleaved sections of interviews with Grassler and Hilberg about the Warsaw Ghetto, the crosscutting echoes by formal means the interviewees’ perceptions, which are often filmically diametrically opposed. We also witness Lanzmann’s dialogically attuned interview technique. The questions he puts to Hilberg are designed to draw out the pressures and contradictions of Adam Czerniakow’s role as Head of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat. Indeed, Lanzmann’s conversations with Hilberg about Czerniakow’s diary almost take on the status of an ‘interview with the dead’, in which the wished-for interlocutor can only be reached indirectly. Freddy Hirsch, champion of orphans in the Czech Family Camp at Auschwitz, is another such figure, as, in the outtakes, is the Hungarian-born Rabbi Michael Weissmandl. Weissmandl escaped a death train during the war and campaigned to halt deportations from Slovakia; due to his early death in 1957, Lanzmann could only approach this learned, charismatic figure by way of interviews with his associates, including the artist Siegmund Forst, none of which appears in Shoah. By contrast to the way in which he approaches Hilberg, Lanzmann’s questions to Grassler are rhetorical ones to induce him to reveal, or even re-enact, his ideological delusions. Like all the Nazis interviewed in Shoah, Grassler is at once a perpetrator of, and a witness to, mass death. Like Karski, he claims to have found the Warsaw Ghetto so ‘appalling’ that he entered it only infrequently; unlike Karski, he actually met Czerniakow, its doomed leader. The similarity ends there, however, between the profound identification with the Jews of Warsaw enacted by Karski, and Grassler’s refusal to return to a past that he helped to deform. The footage between Karski’s interview and Grassler’s is of the coal-wagon on a moving train, filmed by a camera placed on top of the coal, offering a viewpoint which, according to Stuart Liebman, replicates that of the Ukrainian and Latvian guards who sat atop the trains.100 This train footage shows that, despite their differences, mass death is the shared subject of the

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interviews with both Grassler and Hilberg. Like the repeated motif of a smoking crematorium chimney in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, which signifies Art’s father Vladek’s status as eye-witness to murder at Auschwitz, in Shoah the recurrent shots of moving trains convey the process of mechanised mass death and act as transitions between witnesses, as they did between worlds during the Holocaust years. As is customary in Shoah, our first view of Grassler is delayed. After the train shot prefacing this encounter, and before we see the man who speaks, there follows a long, aerial pan of Warsaw, as a signifier of a place we hear Grassler claim not to remember: ‘I recall more clearly my pre-war mountaineering trips than the entire war period and those days in Warsaw.’ Lanzmann’s response, ‘I’ll help you remember,’ is typical of his double-voiced responses to Grassler in being both facilitating and threatening. However, this is not a moral but a ‘technical’ threat on Lanzmann’s part, designed to encourage the former Nazi to speak.101 It is accompanied by the camera reaching a standstill above the former Ghetto, followed by the delayed head-shot of Grassler himself, our first sight of this ordinary-looking, bespectacled middle-aged man, who answers even Lanzmann’s most ironic-sounding questions in an eager and lively tone as if relieved to have his ideas backed up. The footage of this former Nazi is in colour; as Lanzmann clarifies in his autobiography, the hard lesson of being assaulted for secretly filming Heinz Schubert meant that he preferred to film Grassler, at his Munich home, openly.102 Grassler’s professions of ignorance about the existence of Czerniakow’s diary, such that he imitates the diarist in writing down significant dates from the past – starting on 7 July 1941, the first mention of his own name – is intercut with Hilberg’s description of the diary as a ‘window’ onto a doomed community. Remarkably, the same footage of Warsaw that accompanied Karski’s description of entering the Warsaw Ghetto is shown while Hilberg describes Czerniakow’s ‘sardonic’ observations on the death that he ‘lived with’. We see again the deserted old building, remnant and signifier of the vanished Ghetto; the enamel name-plate ‘Wolnos´c´’, ‘freedom’,

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on a wall; and a distant shot of the blue sign on an apartment building wall, but without the zoom that had previously revealed it to read ‘40 ul. Nowolipki’. This is not an accidental repetition of footage, but one designed to draw on the spectator’s memory. We recall the earlier zoom, which implied Karski’s first-hand knowledge of the Ghetto, and note its absence here. Lanzmann’s interview with Grassler relies on a pointed variant of the ‘small questions’ favoured by both him and Hilberg. He asks why there was typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto; what was the Germans’ policy for the Ghetto; what does a ghetto mean; why Czerniakow committed suicide. In each case, Grassler responds with evasive ‘small answers’ that avoid the subject of his own responsibility. Here Lanzmann’s role as interviewer is laid bare. His questions throughout Shoah are

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strategic. Even where clarification is sought, information is not an end in itself but a means to gain closer access to the past and its traces. In the encounter with Grassler, the loaded question is taken to an extreme in a way we only otherwise experience in the encounter with Kretschmer in the outtakes. Grassler’s inconsequential remarks, which imply that the fate of the Jews was a natural disaster and not a racial policy he helped to implement, are ‘answered’ both by Lanzmann’s ripostes and by the shot construction. When Grassler claims that Czerniakow knew of the plans to exterminate the Jews before he did, Lanzmann’s observation, ‘It’s hard to believe,’ is again both facilitating, since it draws Grassler further into his evasion, and threatening, since it implies that what Grassler says is untrue. Grassler’s reply to Lanzmann’s next question, ‘When was the first deportation to Treblinka?’ (to which, of course, he already knows the answer), reveals the cost of such evasion in what appears to be a colossal example of a Freudian slip: GRASSLER

Before Auerswald’s suicide, I believe.

LANZMANN

Auerswald’s?

GRASSLER

I mean Czerniakow’s. Sorry.

LANZMANN

July 22.

Not only has Grassler accidentally conjured up a fantasy world, in which the Nazi Auerswald would die rather than send people to their Hilberg and Grassler exchange glances

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deaths, but he also omits a crucial causal link. Czerniakow committed suicide on 23 July not just coincidentally after, but as a result of, the first deportations. In another feat of editing, what we hear next is Hilberg’s account of a second slip, one that Czerniakow made when writing in his diary on the day of his death: ‘Czerniakow is so agitated that he doesn’t put the dates down correctly – instead of saying July 22, 1942, he says July 22, 1940.’ This is not an error of self-exculpation, like Grassler’s insistence that he was only twentyeight in 1942 (as Lanzmann reminds him, he was born in 1912), but, if anything, Czerniakow’s wishful retreat to a time before the Ghetto was walled off and began, in Hilberg’s phrase, ‘dying’. This ironic juxtaposition of errors is supported by some of the abrupt transitions between the Grassler and Hilberg sections, which are not buffered by footage of trains or cities. Three of these consist of quick cuts which ‘shuttle’, in Felman’s term,103 between close-ups of Hilberg and Grassler. In two of these instances, Grassler stands as the embodiment of Hilberg’s utterance. The first time, Hilberg notes that Czerniakow ‘lived among death’, whereupon we see Grassler’s face. On the second occasion the historian concludes a section of monologue in which he credits Czerniakow – in this pair of interviews all about acknowledging versus disavowing what one knows – with foresight: ‘So he takes for granted, he assumes, he anticipates everything that is happening to the Jews, including the worst.’ As if the phrase ‘including the worst’ had conjured him up, there follows immediately a cut to Grassler.104 The third time, we see a reverse movement: it is Grassler who looks at Hilberg. Grassler states that, ‘They [the Jews] couldn’t do anything’ about conditions in the Ghetto, then looks to the right; there follows a cut to Hilberg. In Shoah, even where the estimates of the two interviewees, in this case about the Jews’ powerlessness, appear to dovetail, their views of the past are entirely at odds. The shuttling between the two interviews emphasises this irony in its imitation of a shot-reverse-shot pattern between Hilberg and Grassler. What we really see is the two men looking across an unbridgeable divide.

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7 Poland: The Ethics of Filming The crosscutting between Hilberg and Grassler places side by side the deference Lanzmann shows Hilberg, as an intellectual mentor, and his business-like attitude towards Grassler. In contrast to this are some of his interviews with Polish bystanders who witnessed the mass murder of their compatriots. Lanzmann’s representation of Polish individuals and, by implication, of Poland itself during the war, has been subject to more critical debate than almost any other aspect of Shoah. In his autobiography and in interviews, Lanzmann has explained his regret that he did not decide to visit Poland until 1978, five years into his filmic project. He had seen the country as a ‘non-place’, and considered that the Holocaust was rather located in people’s minds.105 His arrival in Poland in the winter of 1978 was something of an aesthetic and historical revelation, since it allowed him to experience the ‘shock’ of seeing, for instance, a station still functioning at Treblinka, not as a memorial but offering an everyday service. This unexpected anomaly profoundly affected Lanzmann’s conception of his film, revealing the potential to include in it footage of the Polish landscape and offering a crucial contrast ‘between the quasi-mythical word [Treblinka] and the ordinary, peaceful place today’. He returned the following summer, for the first of four visits, and ‘urgently’ began filming.106 The critics who see an anti-Polish bias in Shoah locate it in both the dialogue and imagery. For instance, in the opening sequence of Shoah in the interview with Simon Srebnik, there is a cut to a shot of a church spire; so obtrusive is the spire that it takes a few moments to realise that, in the lower half of the shot, Srebnik’s boat is returning slowly across the screen. It is not the church after all that is the focus – yet its presence in the film, if once accidental, has been preserved. The spire is an ironised image, like the hen wandering heedlessly up

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the grassy track at Sobibor, and the dazzlingly beautiful tracking shot of the ash-filled River Bug reflecting a sunset that accompanies Paula Biren’s voice, talking about returning to visit her home-town of Lodz: ‘How can I face it?’ Yet there is a large crucifix on the wall behind Henryk Gawkowski as he relives the time he spent driving the Jews to Treblinka. Here, the nature of his recollection makes this reminder of Polish Catholicism poignant rather than ironic. Context is all. The imputed bias represented by the spire presiding mutely over Srebnik’s boat draws upon a wider debate about the fate of Poland during the war and Polish attitudes towards the extermination of 3 million Polish Jews, whose absence from the Polish landscape is one of the effects captured by Lanzmann’s camera. While it is argued that Polish non-Jewish deaths during the war were equal in number to those of the Jews, and that there are more Polish Righteous Gentiles honoured at Yad Vashem for their rescue of Jews than from any other nation, it is also averred that the non-Jewish Polish experience was one of occupation, however extreme, not genocide, and that antisemitism

The role of the church

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was rife during the war: many Poles either betrayed their Jewish compatriots or were pleased to see them vanish.107 The recent Polish documentary film Po-Lin: Slivers of Memory (Jolanta Dylewska, 2008), named after the Yiddish name for Poland which also means in Hebrew ‘we live here’, seems to be a stage in this debate and an implicit riposte to Shoah. In Dylewska’s film, footage from home movies made by American Jews visiting ‘the old country’ and their relatives in the 1930s is juxtaposed with present-day interviews of the last surviving Polish neighbours of these long-dead people. In contrast to Shoah, the Polish interviewees give voice to almost invariably positive and affectionate memories. But it is the eye-witness effect of bystanders that Lanzmann seeks in his interviews with Polish individuals, rather than to make a judgment on the content of what they say. Judgment may be implicit in the question he poses in various forms to the villagers at Grabow, near Chelmno, about whether they miss the Jews, but it is the fact that The River Bug

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they lived alongside these vanished people and were witnesses to their deaths that is his first interest. Lanzmann does not seek in any sociological way to present a negative image of Poland by focusing on what his critics have complained are uniformly ‘dilapidated houses’, horses and carts, and ‘primitive faces’.108 As we have seen, it is precisely ‘dilapidation’, as a repository of the past’s traces, that has a filmic value for Lanzmann. He is still always interested in the ‘small questions’ and it is up to the spectator not to judge uncinematically or hastily: either that the Poles are represented negatively, or that this represents an unacceptable bias.109 As Timothy Garton Ash notes, we may be expecting ‘an ideological answer’ to some of the questions Lanzmann poses, for instance, about why the Poles say the Jews smelt bad, yet the answer is pragmatic: they were tanners and it was the hides that stank.110 In a way that similarly complicates the apparently simple representation of Polish witnesses, Shoshana Felman offers a reading of the extraordinary assertion by Mr Kantorowski, the organ-player and singer in the church at Chelmno, that he heard a rabbi say the Jews’ deaths were expiation for Christ’s death, as standing for ‘the failure of all ready-made cultural discourses to account for – and bear witness to – the Holocaust’.111 Lanzmann’s offence is seen in filmic terms. He is accused of ‘malicious editing’ to build up a negative picture of Polish behaviour; not engaging in full communication with the Polish interviewees through misunderstanding both their words and their world-view; confusing their indifference or ‘stake in’ genocide with Christian antisemitism, and suggesting that both are complicit in the commission of murder; and not providing a full or balanced exploration, as Garton Ash argues that Lanzmann does for the mechanism of extermination.112 Several of these accusations are questionable at the least – I do not detect any intellectual confusion behind the material that we see – but no doubt any riposte Lanzmann gave would point to his auteurist conception of the film. Shoah represents his ‘obsessions’, as he puts it, and the material he gathered,

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the shots he constructed and the editing he engaged in, are all directed towards presenting an individual vision. He notes that in most cases he was the first person who had asked the Polish peasants about the events of the Holocaust years and that ‘they wanted only to tell their story about it’.113 This eagerness to speak is clear in the sequence with the Treblinka villagers, who push forward to relate the details they recall; and the people outside the church at Chelmno who cluster around Lanzmann and the translator and debate among themselves. It is perhaps to Lanzmann’s credit that he gives a sense of the occasional confusion of ideas and emotions that this wish to speak gives rise to, despite Garton Ash’s suggestion that what is missing from the film is just such a comprehension of the ‘bizarre mixture of superstition and earthy commonsense in the peasants’ mental world’. Rather, Garton Ash suggests that Lanzmann’s questions are ‘aggressive, even angry’.114 It is true that he presses home the significant or symbolic elements of these encounters. For instance, Lanzmann refers to ‘Oswiecim’ as ‘Auschwitz’ during his interview with Mrs Pietyra, a resident of that town, allowing him to ask ambiguously, ‘What happened to the Jews of Auschwitz’? Here Lanzmann draws on the shocking contrast between the ‘quasimythical’ name ‘Auschwitz’ and the commonplace reality of the town Oswiecim today, which we see in a travelling shot of a shopping street, that so struck him in relation to Treblinka. The film’s assumption is that the Polish interviewees are the witnesses of the fate of others, and they are not asked about their own experiences, nor that of non-Jewish Poles who may have been killed or imprisoned in the camps. Shoah is not about the Poles or their behaviour during the war, nor even their responses, but about the Holocaust and what they saw. For this reason alone they are not judged, so much as made into part of a ‘mosaic’ of witnesses, in Roger Ebert’s term. The cumulative effect of the Polish bystanders’ words about the Jews is just what Lanzmann aims to create throughout Shoah: the cinematic triangulation of a vanished people, and their last hours. We hear about, since we cannot actually hear,

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the voices of the dead, their cries for water and for their lives. Czeslaw Borowi, a farmer in Treblinka, witnessed the deportation trains and reproduces the sound of Yiddish, as it seemed to him – ‘la la la’ – in a way that may indeed arise from disparagement. In answer to Lanzmann’s question, ‘Was the Jews’ noise something special?’, Borowi clarifies: ‘They spoke Jew.’ Lanzmann’s demeanour during this encounter – he looks away from Borowi, wraps his arms defensively around his body, twists from side to side as if distracted or disbelieving – may make his question, quoting Borowi’s words and via the translator, ‘Does Mr Borowi understand “Jew”?’, sound sardonic.115 But this remark, rather than being confrontational, simply follows Lanzmann’s habit throughout Shoah of ‘inquisitively’ repeating the words just uttered.116 Equally, speculation about such motives or ‘psychology’, in Lanzmann’s term, is irrelevant. What is important is the fact that we almost hear the voices of the dead through what Borowi says. He cannot reproduce the words of the dead, as Podchlebnik does when he describes hearing ‘people praying Czeslaw Borowi

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– Shema Israel’ as they were pushed into the gas vans, but the effect of reincarnation is a similar one. The ‘mosaic’ of Polish witnesses is wide-ranging. We learn from another Treblinka villager that he got used to the screams from the camp although with hindsight the situation seems ‘impossible’; and see another villager weep at the memory of a mother with a child being shot ‘in the heart’ for trying to escape from a train. As the translator puts it, ‘This gentleman has lived here a long time; he can’t forget it.’ Even the juxtaposition of divergent viewpoints does not imply historical conclusions but registers different experiences. The Treblinka villagers recall giving water to the doomed Jews, whereas Bomba says ‘not a drop’ came his way; Gawkowski flatly denies the possibility of the Pullman cars full of well-dressed western Jews that Borowi describes. Similarly, in Maus, Art draws the camp orchestra twice, even though his father insists he does not recall one at Auschwitz, the second time partially obscured by marching prisoners to represent the difference of opinion.

A Treblinka villager weeps

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8 Testimony Lanzmann’s three ‘heroes’, Glazar, Vrba and Müller, are central to Shoah’s project of testimony and witness. But they are not the interviewees who have received the most critical attention. This is partly because these three narrate their stories with low-key clarity and intensity. The mise en scène for the interviews with Glazar, Vrba and Müller also follows this less dramatic format. It consists of alternation between close-ups of the inteviewees’ faces with presentday footage of the locations described in the testimonies. This contrasts with the interviews with Bomba and Srebnik, where the testifier does not ‘tell’ but undertakes a ‘staged’ return to the past: to a barber shop, and floating on the Narew River. Lastly, none of the three ‘heroes’ exhibits the fascinatingly oblique relation to events of the Polish bystanders, nor the troubling, self-deluding recall of Suchomel and Grassler. Yet Filip Müller’s interview, broken up into several sections at the end of Shoah, is in several respects a counterpart to that with Jan Karski, except that Müller was himself a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz and survived five ‘selections’ there. Lanzmann argues that the ‘fundamental issues’ of the film are ‘incarnated’ in Müller’s interview: ‘knowledge and ignorance, deceit, violence, resistance’.117 Although these ‘fundamental issues’ are a mixture of actions on the part of the perpetrators and reactions on the part of the victims, Müller takes up the viewpoint of the latter to such an extent that he brings the spectator into the gas chamber with him. Müller’s measured, intent discourse is initially deceptive, suggesting a calm which is echoed in the look of the shot: dressed in a white shirt, Müller sits against the pale backdrop of a sofa and the horizontal bars of a white blind. Like Karski, Müller ventriloquises the dead; and, as in some of the sequences from Karski’s interview, we hear Müller’s voice while the

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camera shows us footage of the outside world. Lanzmann claims that throughout Shoah ‘the transition from on- to off-screen sound is fundamental to the film: the voice exists over the landscape and they reinforce each other’.118 This was clear in the footage of New York and contemporary Warsaw that accompanied Karski’s story, as it is in the shots of present-day Birkenau which alternate with close-ups of Müller’s face. Unexpectedly, Müller is not only the spokesperson for the dead Jews of the Czech Family Camp. He also acts out and retrieves momentarily in the present the gestures and voices of the Nazi overseers. Just as Lanzmann is confronted with the documents of the past in the form of a Treblinka train timetable and a letter from Willy Just, so Müller recalls a note being handed to Peter Voss, the SS officer in charge of the crematoria. In an extraordinary act of revival, Müller acts out Voss holding the note in the palm of his hand and habit of talking to himself (‘What would they do without Voss?’). Voss left the note behind when he went to inspect some gassed bodies and when Müller read it he learned of the plans to exterminate the Czech Family Camp. At the very moment he relates, ‘I was shocked by what I read,’ there is a cut away from Müller to a landscape. We see a slow, ‘space-compressing’119 zoom into a pond reflecting the sky, and we hear the soft trickle and mutter of moving water. In contrast to the pale accents of the room where Müller sits, this watery surface is dark and opaque. The closer the camera approaches, the less we can see; the sky vanishes and we look only at shiny, rippled blackness. Here is the visual correlative of a word, ‘ashes’, that Müller quotes twice during this sequence, once from the utterance of the SS officer Voss – ‘By morning those five hundred pieces [bodies] must be reduced to ashes’ – and once, as if in riposte, from one of the Resistance leaders: ‘we’ll reduce the crematoria to ashes’. Yet although we are shown the ashes, still colouring the marshy ground of Auschwitz, we can barely see them.120 This image of ashes is no more an ‘illustration’ of Müller’s narrative than is the shot of the ruined

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crematorium that opened this sequence. Rather, the ash-filled pond and crumbled brick structure suggest the erosion and persistence of memory itself, the very vehicle for Müller’s story. This sequence is followed by the last section of Müller’s interview, in which he does not act out the words of someone else in the past, but undergoes his own traumatic return. Throughout his testimony, Müller approaches closer and closer to the scene of death itself. At first he describes himself witnessing the ‘frightful scene’ of violence against the Czech Family Camp members in the undressing room, where he stood near the ‘rear door’. Müller’s recall of a sudden outburst of song interrupts his testimony: ‘The whole undressing room rang with the Czech national anthem, and the Hatikvah. That moved me terribly, that …’. At this moment Müller cannot go on; he pauses and looks down, as if towards the past. After a moment of silence he weeps, showing, as Shoah does throughout, the power of song, whether recalled or re-enacted, as a The Lake of Ashes

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bodily vehicle for recall.121 In his introduction to the French translation of Müller’s memoir, Lanzmann forcefully describes what we see in this scene: ‘the past was resuscitated with so much violence that all distance was abolished, it was a pure present, the very opposite of memory’.122 It is as if Müller is weeping in the present as he wept in the past. But it is not just reincarnation that takes place at this moment. Although he pleads with Lanzmann to ‘please stop’, Müller continues his story through his tears and through the past. He describes his resolve to die with his countrymen in the gas chamber: ‘You were inside the gas chamber?’ Lanzmann asks, as he does of Bomba. ‘Were you yourself already in the gas chamber?’ It is not just the extreme proximity to those who died and their ‘last moments’ that Lanzmann seeks here, nor even Müller’s recall of their last words to him – ‘You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering, and to the injustice done to us’ – but this view of the gas chamber from inside, as Roger Ebert puts it: ‘Always before, in reading about [the gas chambers] or hearing about them, my point of view was outside, looking in. Müller put me inside.’123 This is the ultimate riposte to the ‘missing reel’, the non-existent film of people viewed through the gas-chamber viewing aperture, and constitutes a version of the impossible reverse shot. Only in testimony is this possible. The sequence concludes with a slow rightwards pan across a white scale model of the gas chamber complex at Auschwitz, complete with miniature figures in the undressing room. This conclusion performs two functions. Like the photograph of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto that prefaces the interview with Simcha Rottem and Itzhak Zuckermann, this model is shown as a memorial object rather than as a substitute for contemporary footage. It also acts as a visual link between this section of Müller’s testimony and that of Vrba, whose opening words sound as if he is taking up the baton of a shared account: ‘That’s how it ended with the Czech family transport.’ But it is still an uncomfortable experience to see this model, and it is the only time in Shoah that we come so close to a visual representation of

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the act of murder and the people who were its victims. Otherwise, we only see the world of the present. *

*

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As Shoah is a film about how the past persists within the present, it seems fitting to conclude by considering its own afterlife. The film was received on its release with a mixture of engagement and aversion, the latter particularly on the part of some survivors who did not wish to revisit the world of the camps, and most notably by the critic Pauline Kael, who stated in a New Yorker review that she preferred Marcel Ophüls’ equally interview-based film The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) about French resistance and collaboration.124 However, today Shoah is a touchstone for a certain kind of nonfiction film, as well as one that demonstrates a particular aesthetic of atrocity. Michael Rothberg reminds us that Shoah is not a documentary but, rather, a ‘performative reenactment’ of the past.125 It is thus both ironic and inevitable that Shoah itself has become an event that is re-enacted. Indeed, the ‘present’ in which the events of the past are retrieved in Lanzmann’s film is in its turn now part of a vanished era. Postec observes that one of Lanzmann’s filming journeys to Poland took place on the eve of Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law in late 1981, while the footage in Israel was taken before the first intifada of 1987. In Sobibor film of the present-day locations of Yehuda Lerner’s story, including Belarussian forests, the cityscapes of Warsaw and Minsk, and the remains of the death camp, was shot in 2000. Thus the ‘present moment’ in Lanzmann’s work is a shifting occasion, reflecting the period during which the raw data of interview footage was transformed into an aesthetic whole and not the time of the interview itself. Several of the director’s visits to Poland took place during the process of editing Shoah after interviewing was complete; thus different generations of footage are intercut in the film, but no hint is given of the complex temporal layering that this represents. For instance, Postec describes what she calls ‘Filip Müller’s march’, which we see as Müller describes first entering

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Auschwitz: ‘a traveling shot from the executions wall in Block 11 in Auschwitz – the central camp – into the inner parts of the crematorium’.126 Yet this footage was shot at a much later time than the interview itself, ensuring its distance from any notion of illustration since the ‘present’ of the interview does not match the ‘present’ of the landscape film. If, by some unlikely turn of events, Lanzmann decided to release any further material such as the Einsatzgruppen interviews from Shoah’s outtakes, these too could be fascinatingly set against film of the contemporary locations of murder in Russia and Ukraine, for instance, Kursk, Zhytomyr and Simferopol, and also perhaps what remains of the Einsatzgruppen training-camp at Pretzsch in Germany. Of all these instances, Richard Brody is correct to observe that the effect of hearing about the past while seeing the present is ‘to place [the witnesses’] history at the heart of contemporary moral crises’.127 Yet these too differ over time: if it is life behind the Iron Curtain that is encapsulated in much of Shoah’s footage, the ‘crises’ implicit in the landscape shots in Sobibor are those of post-Soviet independence. I have already mentioned the explicit and implicit citation of Shoah in work by Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard and Jolanta Dylewska, and the films of the contemporary Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke, particularly Funny Games (1997/2007), have been analysed in the terms of Lanzmann’s aesthetic principles since they are about acts of violence, albeit fictional ones, that we do not see.128 The BBC2 film The Last Nazis: Most Wanted (Charlie Russell, 2009) follows Lanzmann’s methodology of filming both the moments between encounters as well as the whole conversation, including the process of translation, as part of the interviews of such nonagenarian alleged perpetrators of mass murder as Sandor Kepiro and Milivoj Asner. However, in none of the encounters in The Last Nazis does Russell, who is interviewer as well as director, succeed in breaching his subjects’ ‘carapace of denial’,129 and nothing like the ‘re-enactment’ of Suchomel singing occurs. Other kinds of visual representation may equally have Shoah as a

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precusor, for instance Pascal Croci’s graphic novel Auschwitz,130 in which the author acknowledges the influence of Lanzmann’s reliance on multiple witnesses and recasts scenes from the film as panels of the graphic novel. Elements of Shoah are cited to more questioning than reverential effect in Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi’s Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine–Israel (2004). Like Shoah, this film includes an interview with a barber who describes a massacre while he cuts a customer’s hair – but this time it is a Palestinian barber in the Israeli town of Dod, and the massacre is one that took place in 1947 in which Palestinians were the victims, Israelis the perpetrators. This sequence is an ambivalent homage to Lanzmann’s encounter with Abraham Bomba in Shoah. It is an intertextual moment that, Sivan argues, does not seek to demonstrate the comparability of the Holocaust and the Palestinian view of the founding of the state of Israel, but the fact that the two events are ‘historically continuous and contiguous, part of a single historical process’.131 Lanzmann has criticised Route 181 both for its thesis132 and its technique. Although it uses a format of multiple interviews similar to his own, in Sivan and Khleifi’s film the interviewees are anonymous, of which Lanzmann says: ‘we do not know who is speaking, not a single name is given in the film. In Mr Sivan’s films, the witnesses do not sign their testimonies.’133 In this way we see that Shoah continues to take a central role in contemporary moral and aesthetic debates.

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Appendix: Overview of Shoah Overview of Shoah Protagonist

Place:

Setting:

past

present

Chelmno

Chelmno

Trope/topic

First Epoch Simon Srebnik

Landscape (‘This is the place’)

Motke Zaïdel

Ponari

Israel

Landscape (‘The place resembles Ponari’)

Zaïdel and

Vilna

Israel

Family (in grave)

Itzhak Dughin Richard Glazar

Treblinka

Switzerland

Fire (bodies burn)

Zaïdel and

Sobibor

Israel

Fire (pyre of bodies)

Srebnik

Chelmno

Chelmno

Bodies (into river)

Paula Biren

Auschwitz

USA

Will not return to Lodz

Mrs Pietyra

Oswiecim

Oswiecim

Still lives there; cemetery

Mr Filipowicz

Wlodawa

Wlodawa

Dughin

Still lives there; saw deportations to Sobibor

Mr Falborski

Kolo

Kolo

Lives there; deportations to Chelmno

Bomba

Treblinka

Tel Aviv

Deportation

Czeslaw Borowi

Treblinka

Treblinka

Lives there; saw arrivals

Villagers

Treblinka

Treblinka

Live there; ploughed fields and saw ‘asphyxiations’; water; winter

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Protagonist

Place:

Setting:

past

present

Borowi

Treblinka

Treblinka

Bomba

Treblinka

Treblinka

Trope/topic They spoke ‘Jew’ From within the train; heat; water

Gawkowski

Malkinia

Treblinka

Heard screams behind locomotive; answers question about Bomba’s wait in train

Glazar

Treblinka

Treblinka

Travel for two days; warning gesture

Villagers

Treblinka

Treblinka

Gesture

Borowi

Treblinka

Treblinka

Warning; foreign Jews

Gawkowski

Treblinka

Treblinka

Foreign Jews

Piwonski

Sobibor

Sobibor

Pushed the trains; Lanzmann in camp; fine days like today

Vrba

Auschwitz

New York

Good weather, ramp

Glazar

Treblinka

Switzerland

Became a kapo

Bomba

Treblinka

Treblinka

Left and right

Glazar/Bomba

Treblinka

Treblinka

Disbelief

Glazar/Bomba

Treblinka

Treblinka

Family lost; suicide

Silent dancing

Berlin

Berlin

couple Deutschkron

Deportation from night-club

Berlin

Israel

Won’t go back; escaped ‘destiny of our people’

Suchomel

Germany

Treblinka

‘Treblinka was operating to full capacity’

Piwonski

Sobibor

Sobibor

Silence (of death)

Filip Müller

Auschwitz

Israel

No one may talk

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Protagonist

Place:

Setting:

Trope/topic

past

present

Hilberg

Vermont

history

Steps in process; detail

Schalling

Germany

Chelmno

Screams/silence/clothes

Podchlebnik

Chelmno

Israel

Screams/silence

Villagers

Grabow

Chelmno

He speaks ‘Jew’; couldn’t talk or look; Jesus and Mary

Srebnik

Chelmno

Chelmno

Gas vans; ‘all I’d ever seen was dead bodies’

Willy Just

Chelmno

letter

Improvements to the vans

Suchomel

Treblinka

Germany

Trains; clothes; cold

Bomba

Treblinka

Tel Aviv

Concealment

Suchomel

Treblinka

Germany

His mother, ‘death panic’

Glazar

Treblinka

Switzerland

Infirmary

Vrba

Auschwitz

New York

Second Epoch

The old ramp; concealment for efficiency

Müller

Auschwitz

Israel

Concealment; family

Aaron

Corfu

Auschwitz

‘Burning’

Stier

Berlin

Germany

Trains; resettlement;

Hilberg

train

Vermont

knowledge/talking timetable

Special trains; linguistic concealment; ‘death traffic’; ‘it’s a leftover’

Müller

Auschwitz

Israel

Need for trains

Suchomel

Treblinka

Germany

Need for trains

Glazar

Treblinka

Switzerland

Need for trains; resistance

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90

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Protagonist

Place:

Setting:

Trope/topic

past

present

Vrba

Auschwitz

New York

Elias

Auschwitz

Israel

Didn’t believe

Müller

Auschwitz

Israel

Pieces

Vrba

Auschwitz

New York

(Unsuccessful) resistance

Müller

Auschwitz

Israel

Product was death; resistance

Shared narrative; ‘You were inside the gas chamber?’; bear witness

Vrba

Auschwitz

New York

Karski

Warsaw

Washington,

Ignorance/information;

DC

unprecedented event

Germany

‘I recall more clearly my

Grassler

Warsaw

Bear witness

pre-war mountaineering trips’ Hilberg

Warsaw

Vermont

Grassler

Warsaw

Germany

Czerniakow ‘Did our best to feed the ghetto’

Hilberg

Warsaw

Vermont

Interview with the dead

Grassler

Warsaw

Germany

‘Czerniakow saw before I did that the Jews would be killed’

Gertrude

Warsaw

New York

Yiddish song

Warsaw

Israel

Poison heart

Warsaw

Israel

The last Jew

Schneider and mother Itzhak Zuckermann Simcha Rottem

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Notes 1 Roger Ebert, Review of Shoah, Chicago Sun-Times, 24 November 1985. 2 Claude Lauzxmann, ‘Seminar with Claude Lanzmann’, Yale French Studies 79, November 1990, pp. 82–9: 82. 3 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 62. 4 Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Preface’ to Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. vii. 5 Jean-Marie Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste: Entretien avec Claude Lanzmann’, in J. M. Frodon (ed.), Le Cinéma et la Shoah: Un Art à l’épreuve de la tragédie du 20e siècle (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007), p. 123; translations mine. Thanks to Jennifer Cazenave for this reference. 6 Ziva Postec, ‘Editing Shoah’, , visited 7 April 2010. 7 Claude Lanzmann, Le Lièvre de Patagonie: Mémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), p. 412; translations mine. 8 Ibid., p. 90. 9 Frederic Raphael, ‘Claude Lanzmann’s Liberated Memories’, Times Literary Supplement 8 July 2009. 10 Daniel Talbot, ‘Distributing Shoah’, in Stuart Liebman (ed.), Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’: Key Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 53. 11 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, pp. 74–5. 12 See Dominick LaCapra, ‘Lanzmann’s Shoah: “Here There is No Why” ’, in Liebman (ed.), Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, p. 214.

13 Giacomo Lichtner, Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), p. 162. 14 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 429. 15 Ibid., pp. 234, 539–40. 16 Ibid., p. 467. 17 Jay Carr, ‘A Monument Against Forgetting the Holocaust’, Boston Globe 3 November 1985. 18 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 113. 19 Claude Lanzmann, interview with the author, 19 September 2009. 20 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, pp. 113–14. 21 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 457. 22 Ibid., p. 440. 23 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 115. 24 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 431. 25 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 115. 26 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 476. 27 Sarah Cooper, Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (London: Legenda, 2008), p. 6. 28 See Raye Farr, ‘Some Reflections on Claude Lanzmann’s Approach to the Examination of the Holocaust’, in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (eds), Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933 (London: Wallflower, 2005). 29 Frank Kermode quoted in Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 30 See Matthew Supersad’s review, Sight & Sound 19 (12), December 2009, p. 81.

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31 Cooper, Selfless Cinema?, p. 7. 32 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1996), p. 158. 33 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 122. 34 See Henri Meschonnic, ‘Pour en finir avec le mot Shoah’, Le Monde 20–1 February 2005. 35 Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, p. 152 n. 6. 36 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 437. 37 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vantage International, 1989). 38 Ibid., p. 442. 39 LaCapra, ‘Lanzmann’s Shoah: “Here There Is No Why” ’, p. 194. 40 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 116; and Jan Karski, ‘Shoah’, in Liebman (ed.), Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, p. 173. 41 Raphael, ‘Claude Lanzmann’s Liberated Memories’. 42 Tim Lucas, ‘Back to the Garden’, Sight & Sound 19 (9), September 2009, p. 88. 43 Claude Lanzmann, ‘From the Holocaust to “Holocaust” ’, in Liebman (ed.), Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, p. 33. 44 Cooper, Selfless Cinema?, p. 2. 45 Andy Charlesworth, ‘Topography of Genocide’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 218. 46 Cooper, Selfless Cinema?, p. 8. 47 See Adam Brown, ‘Representation and Judgement: “Privileged” Jews in Holocaust Writing and Film’, unpublished PhD thesis, Deakin University, Australia, 2009. 48 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 464.

49 Cooper, Selfless Cinema?, p. 3. In his critical account of Lanzmann’s motives and actions, LaCapra agrees with Lanzmann’s own description of this as ‘a lack of human respect for others’ (‘ Lanzmann’s Shoah’, p. 219). 50 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 468. See also the director Marcel Ophüls’ positive verdict on Lanzmann’s assertion of his own ‘moral priorities’, ‘Closely Watched Trains’, in Liebman, ed., Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, p. 85. 51 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 119. 52 Richard Bernstein, ‘An Epic Film about the Greatest Evil of Modern Times’, New York Times 20 October 1985, p. 3. 53 Postec, ‘Editing Shoah’. 54 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 121. 55 Ibid., p. 114. 56 Simone Gigliotti, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), p. 4. 57 See André Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1993). 58 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, pp. 453, 475. 59 Claude Lanzmann, ‘Why Spielberg has Distorted the Truth’, Guardian Weekly 3 April 1994, p. 14, reprinted from Le Monde. 60 See Libby Saxton, ‘Anamnesis and Bearing Witness: Lanzmann/Godard’, in For Ever Godard (ed.) Michael Temple et al. (London: Black Dog, 2004). 61 ‘Seminar with Claude Lanzmann’, p. 99. 62 Shoshana Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, in

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Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London: Routledge 1992), p. 210. 63 Robert Brinkley and Steven Youra, ‘Tracing Shoah’, PMLA 111 (1), January 1996, pp. 108–27: 112. 64 Lanzmann, ‘Why Spielberg has Distorted the Truth’. 65 See Libby Saxton, ‘Fragile Faces: Levinas and Lanzmann’, Film-Philosophy 11 (2), 2007, pp. 1–14. 66 Quoted in ibid., p. 1 n. 1. 67 See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 68 Marc Chevrie and Hervé le Roux, ‘Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about Shoah’, in Liebman (ed.), Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, p. 47. 69 Ibid., p. 45. 70 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 475. 71 Judy Stone, ‘About Films and Beyond’, , visited 7 February 2010. 72 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 504. 73 Saxton, ‘Fragile Faces’, p. 10. 74 Bryan Burns, ‘Fiction of the Real: Shoah and Documentary’, in Sue Vice (ed.), Representing the Holocaust: Essays in Honour of Bryan Burns (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003). 75 See Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); and Primo Levi, If This is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1991), p. 21.

76 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 118. 77 Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), pp. 272, 262, 270. 78 Ibid., p. 263. 79 Raul Hilberg et al. (eds), The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), p. 70. 80 Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), p. 71. 81 Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, p. 61. 82 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 450. 83 Ibid., 451. 84 Thanks to Joshua Simpson for pointing this out. 85 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 124. 86 However, this is signalled in the French transcript: ‘Cette phrase murmurée, en yiddish’ (‘This phrase is murmured in Yiddish’), in Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 169. 87 Yannick Haenel, Jan Karski: Roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), p. 24; translations mine. 88 Haenel suggests that Karski’s question is directed at Lanzmann within the diegesis (ibid., p. 20), but, despite what looks like an eyeline match with the interviewer at this point, it seems to go beyond this to an extra-diegetic address to the audience. 89 Ibid., pp. 19, 15. 90 See Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 91 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 114.

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92 Alexander Kruglov, ‘Jewish Losses in Ukraine, 1941–1944’, in Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (eds), The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 273. 93 Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 103. Thanks to Lawrence Douglas for this reference. 94 Quoted in Ernst Klee et al. (eds), ‘Those Were the Days’: The Holocaust as Seen by the Perpetrators and Bystanders (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), pp. 167, 164. 95 Interview with the author, 17 September 2009. 96 The outtakes were created by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of Shoah and are used and cited by permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem. 97 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 459. ‘Sorel’ received ten replies, five of which (including Walter Stier’s) were positive. Judy Stone argues that Sorel is presented by Lanzmann as a ‘sympathetic, right-wing historian’ (, visited 4 January 2009), but it is perhaps the representation of this figure as an indifferent recorder of historical testimony that is most interesting. 98 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 470. 99 Ibid., p. 462.

100 Liebman, ‘Introduction’, Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, p. 11. 101 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 116 102 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 483. 103 Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice’, p. 215. 104 See Raymond Bellour’s analysis of the opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) in such terms: Mark Rutland hears a description of the thieving young woman and his look off-screen then appears to conjure her up (The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 221). 105 Lanzmann, Le Lièvre, p. 443. 106 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 117. 107 See for instance Antony Polonsky (ed.), My Brother’s Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 108 Jean-Charles Szurek quotes Jerzy Urban to this effect, in his ‘Shoah: From the Jewish Question to the Polish Question’, in Liebman (ed.), Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, p.154. 109 See Szurek on the outraged Polish reception of the film, ibid., pp. 153–9. 110 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The Life of Death’: Shoah – A Film by Claude Lanzmann’, in Liebman, ed., Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, p 143. 111 Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice’, p. 266. 112 Szurek, ‘Shoah’, p. 155; Garton Ash, ‘The Life of Death’, p. 144. 113 Frodon, ‘Le travail du cinéaste’, p. 116. 114 Garton Ash, ‘The Life of Death’, pp. 143, 142.

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115 In interview Lanzmann refers to Borowi with disdain, but acknowledges that, despite himself, the latter ‘suddenly became conscious of having been a witness to an unprecedented event’ (Chevrie and Le Roux, ‘Site and Speech’, p. 47). 116 Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice’, p. 221. 117 Ibid., p. 47. 118 Ibid., p. 45. 119 Fred Camper, ‘Shoah’s absence’, in Liebman (ed.), Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, p. 85. 120 The English subtitled version of Shoah labels this ‘The Lake of Ashes, Birkenau’. 121 Liebman, ‘Introduction’, Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, p. 10. 122 Claude Lanzmann, ‘Préface’ to Filip Müller, Trois Ans dans une Chambre à Gaz à Auschwitz (Paris: Pygmalion, 1980), p. 10, my translation. 123 Ebert, Review of Shoah. 124 Ibid., p. 530. 125 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 190.

126 Postec, ‘Editing Shoah’. 127 Richard Brody, review of Sobibor, New Yorker 20 April 2009. 128 Thanks to Laurence Piercy for this reference. 129 Paul Whitelaw, The Scotsman, 21 September 2009. 130 Pascal Croci, Auschwitz (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004). 131 Quoted in Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weitzman, ‘The Barber Trial: Sivan vs Finkielkraut’, Cabinet 26, summer 2009, , visited 2 April 2010. 132 See ibid. for an account of the libel charge Sivan mounted against the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut for his assertion on national radio that Sivan was an exemplar of ‘Jewish antisemitism’. Finkielkraut’s case, with Lanzmann’s support, drew on the alleged plagiarism by Sivan of Lanzmann’s work in order to establish a ‘false analogy’ between the Holocaust and the expulsion of the Palestinians during the establishment of the state of Israel. 133 Quoted in Keenan and Weitzman, ‘The Barber Trial’.

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Credits Shoah France/1985 Director Claude Lanzmann Producer Claude Lanzmann Cinematography Dominique Chapuis Jimmy Glasberg William Lubtchansky Editors Ziva Postec Anna Ruiz Sound Recording Bernard Aubouy

Sound Recording Michel Vionnet Production Administrator Raymonde BadeMauffroy Production Managers Stella Gregorz-Quef Severine OlivierLachamp Camera Assistants Caroline Champetier DeRibes Jean-Yves Escoffier Slavek Olczyk Andres Silvart

Sound Editors Danielle Fillios Anne-Marie L’Hote Sabine Mamou Research Assistants Corinna Coulmas Irene Steinfeldt-Levi Shalmi Bar Mor Interpreters Barbara Janica Francie Kaufmann Mrs Apfelbaum Subtitles A. Whitelaw W. Byron

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Bibliography Bellour, Raymond, The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Brinkley, Robert and Steven Youra, ‘Tracing Shoah’, PMLA 111 (1), January 1996, pp. 108–27. Bruzzi, Stella, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Burns, Bryan, ‘Fiction of the Real: Shoah and Documentary’, in Sue Vice (ed.), Representing the Holocaust: Essays in Honour of Bryan Burns (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003). Charlesworth, Andy, ‘Topography of Genocide’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The History of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 218. Colombat, André Pierre, The Holocaust in French Film (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1993). Cooper, Sarah, Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (London: Legenda, 2008). Croci, Pascal, Auschwitz (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004). de Beauvoir, Simone, ‘Preface’ to Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. vii. Eaglestone, Robert, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Earl, Hilary, The Nuremberg SSEinsatzgruppen Trial 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Falconer, Rachel, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991).

Farr, Raye, ‘Some Reflections on Claude Lanzmann’s Approach to the Examination of the Holocaust’, in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (eds), Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933 (London: Wallflower, 2005). Felman, Shoshana, ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Frodon, Jean-Marie, ‘Le travail du cinéaste: Entretien avec Claude Lanzmann’, in J. M. Frodon (ed.), Le Cinéma et la Shoah: Un art à l’épreuve de la tragédie du 20e siècle (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007). Gigliotti, Simone, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009). Haenel, Yannick, Jan Karski: Roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). Hilberg, Raul, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). Hilberg, Raul, et al. (eds), The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow (New York: Stein and Day, 1970). Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Karski, Jan, Story of a Secret State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944). Klee, Ernst, et al. (eds), ‘Those Were the Days’: The Holocaust as Seen by the

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Perpetrators and Bystanders (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991). Kruglov, Alexander, ‘Jewish Losses in Ukraine, 1941–1944’, in Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (eds), The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). Lanzmann, Claude, ‘Préface’ to Filip Müller, Trois Ans dans une Chambre à Gaz à Auschwitz (Paris: Pygmalion, 1980). Lanzmann, Claude, ‘Seminar with Claude Lanzmann’, Yale French Studies 79, November 1990, pp. 82–9. Lanzmann, Claude, ‘Why Spielberg has Distorted the Truth’, Guardian Weekly, 3 April 1994, p. 14. Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Lanzmann, Claude, Le Lièvre de Patagonie: Mémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage International, 1989). Levi, Primo, If This is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1991).

Lichtner, Giacomo, Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008). Liebman, Stuart (ed.), Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’: Key Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Polonsky, Antony (ed.), My Brother’s Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Rancière, Jacques, Film Fables (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1996). Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Saxton, Libby, ‘Anamnesis and Bearing Witness: Godard/Lanzmann’, in Forever Godard (ed.), by Michael Temple et al. (London: Black Dog, 2004). Saxton, Libby, ‘Fragile Faces: Levinas and Lanzmann’, Film-Philosophy 11 (2), 2007, pp. 1–14. Saxton, Libby, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Wallflower, 2008). Wieviorka, Annette, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).