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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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