Lanzman's Film Shoah
In recent years there has been an unprecedented effort to collect and preserve
information and accounts of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Video collections
at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yale University's Fortunoff
Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies, and most notably Stephen Spielberg's
Shoah Foundation (Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation) represent
the attempt to document the experiences of those who lived through the Holocaust
and its aftermath before those memories are lost. The context for these collections
is the existence of technologies for recording memories: tape and video recorders,
television and websites to share and circulate these materials. Despite these
efforts, there has long been pressure to forget, even suppress, knowledge
of the Holocaust. Jacob Climo describes his feelings when he learned for the
first time of a public Holocaust memorial site: 'I was overcome with powerful
feelings of emotional pain . as if some secret of my own past had been revealed
by a stranger, without my knowledge or consent . I didn't have a clue about
their source' (184). Climo notes the inability of most people to put their
experiences into words as a process too painful and which conjures up a reliving
of the past trauma.
Shoshana Feldman, in her critical analysis of Claude Lanzmann's nine hour
documentary, Shoah, approaches the film as productive knowledge itself, rather
than a straightfoward recollection of historical events.
To understand Shoah is not to know the Holocaust, but to gain new insights
into what not knowing means, to grasp the ways in which erasure is itself
part of the functioning of our history. The journey of Shoah thus paves the
way toward new possibilities of understanding history, and toward new pragmatic
acts of historicizing history's erasures. (Felman, 'Return of the Voice' 253)
Shoah is a film structured around individual narratives and contemporary images
of Holocaust memorials and sites as an effort to describe the massacres which
took place in the concentration camps. Primarily concentrating on accounts
of the exterminations at Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz, Shoah is comprised
of interviews, images and voices of the prisoners, guards, and witnesses of
the trauma. The film is in several languages: German and English, translated
French, Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew, and Italian, but the final words of the
film are in Hebrew. Across barriers of language, time and space, Lanzmann
attempts the ambitious project of presenting a modern audience with the memories
and experiential truth of the past. Interviews are disjointed, juxtaposed
with others and resumed. Felman continues:
Shoah bears witness to the fragmentation of the testimonies as the radical
invalidation of all definitions, of all parameters of reference, of all known
answers....
The film puts in motion its surprising testimony by performing the historical
and contradictory double task of the breaking of the silence and the simultaneous
shattering of any given discourse, of the breaking--or the bursting open--of
all frames (Felman, 'Return of the Voice' 224)
In spite of the vast differences between experience and narration, it is clear
that the gulf between the past and the present, that is negotiated in the
very act of written and oral witness. The act of transmitting alone is important
and no true knowledge preexists the transmission, that is, the recalling of
memory on the part of the witnesses is an act of creating it.
Depicting events of the Holocaust through the contemporary landscape of the
sites of the camps and oral testimony of survivors and witnesses, Lanzmann's
film attempts to bridge the gulf between event and the viewer, bringing the
events of the Holocaust into the present. He does not call his film a documentary,
in that it is not primarily historical, but insists that it should be viewed
as about the Shoah itself, indicating an ideological division of the Shoah
from history itself. The witness testimony is not "oral history' but rather
the conscious act of bringing the past to the present through narration.
The narrative of Shoah is not univocal, but rather is woven from many voices:
survivors, Nazi officers and concentration camp workers, and Polish civilians
whose own experience of the traumas of the war remains outside the binary
of survivor/perpetrator. Eva Hoffman has articulated the problem of distance:
'Stand too close to the horror, and you get fixation; stand too far and you
get voyeurism and forgetting. Distance matters' (177). The juxtaposition of
personal experience and historical fact at simultaneous points in the film
draws the audience into the lived memory of the survivors, the act of viewing
Shoah signifies the gulf between the past and the present while at the same
time drawing them together, memory and fact, linking the remembered past with
the present, constructed experience of the past.
Shoah has elicited praise and criticism in equal measures. Many scholars of
the Holocaust have questioned his decision not to include any archival material
in his documentary, thereby relying entirely on survivor memory. Ironically,
it is this element of Shoah which the other camp of critics praise, as it
does not attempt yet another historical account of the events of the Holocaust,
but the emotional experience of the trauma and its aftermath. Because the
impact of the film relies on survivor testimony, Lanzmann is careful in his
introduction to dispel any scepticism regarding his use of translation. Because
he is interviewing speakers of German, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish and French,
it was necessary for Lanzmann to accurately translate their narratives to
be understandable to a general audience. The interpreters are on the screen
along with the interviewees, and his own questions have remained within the
narrative. Thus, Lanzmann's own narrative is intertwined with that of the
survivors, incorporating his present experience of the site of the death camps
and identification with the victims into the collective memory of the victims
of the Holocaust.
Shoah is neither fiction nor documentary, but rather the expression of the
past in terms of the experiential truth of both its surviving victims and
witnesses. Lanzmann shows the audience the present day sites of Treblinka,
Auschwitz and Sobibor, walking up the grass-covered ramps down which thousands
of men, women and children were forced to their death. The superimposition
of Lanzmann's present experience of these sites of historical import, and
the memory of what happened at these sites in the past, is a powerful tool.
Berel Lang argues that only certain artistic means are suitable for representing
and portraying the Holocaust, and necessarily requires the so-called 'elevated'
genres of tragic novel, poetry, scholarly essay or autobiography. Although
Lanzmann's cinematic project is technically a documentary, his representation
of the history and experience of the Holocaust complicate notions of communicating
the Holocaust as a 'high' art. Oral testimony is considered more closely aligned
with memory and emotion, as it is an unscripted and un-selfconscious narration.
Despite this sense of oral testimony as a more "authentic" representation
of survivor memory and experience, there is still a gulf between the narrator
and the audience, a gulf which Lanzmann tries to bridge in the very act of
recovering the testimony.
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