6th April 2008

Shoah

Claude Lanzmann 1985

Waking up to find some four inches of snow on the ground was an interesting way to start the day of the screening. Anyway – it’s no small task to attempt to write something in response to this film, which is so vast, in so many different respects, it’s difficult to know where to start. We talked about various things in response to Shoah, and I’ll try to relate what I remember of them, and thoughts that have grown since then – no doubt other points from our discussions can be brought in by others.

We watched the film straight through, with few breaks. It was certainly a demanding task, but the film is relentlessly compelling. It is broken up into two eras, each era being split into two sections, each contained on one DVD. One of the things that we discussed at length concerned the figure of Lanzmann himself – the various modes of his presence throughout the film. He is a controversial figure for many, and there are certainly instances where his style of operation, or the way he appears or is heard during the film, raised questions concerning his role and his approach to the project. His physical presence was one point of interest. His appearance, at least for me, was initially unexpected. I’m not certain what I did expect, but the vision of Lanzmann as a compact, slightly stocky, Parisian sophisticate – particularly when seen in the context of rural Poland – complete with casual shirts and sunglasses, somehow chimed with him being relatively at ease with the people he talked with. Perhaps this is testament to his journalistic background, and his skills in allowing people to open themselves in front of the camera. Lanzmann’s appearance in front of the camera, not to mention his female translators, initially seemed a little strange. The interview exchanges ranged from conversational, improvised and informal (yet not without occasional barbed or insinuating comments) dialogues, to more formalised, structured interviews, no doubt linked to practical demands of each situation, or the demands/needs of specific subjects. Nonetheless, it was intriguing to note Lanzmann’s qualities as an interviewer, especially comparing those times when he is in front of the camera and those when he is hidden behind it (e.g. the covert recordings – the breach of trust between a researcher and his subject another point entirely) – the different intensities of the interviews, and the shifts in his audio/visual presence, were fascinating throughout. As an aside, in addition to Lanzmann and his translators, the film crew also make a few appearances – most often in the hidden camera sequences, where their adjustments to the visual and audio signals from the back of a van seemed to function in an odd way. It was almost as if their modulations of what is being seen or heard served as ornamentations, there to ‘colour’ the otherwise static, restricted camera work.

The issue of the running translations was also discussed. In particular, the French/Polish translations (Polish being one of the few languages that Lanzmann does not speak during the film) gave the first sequences a strange, disconnected rhythm. The interviews in Poland were dominated by this arduous, elongated process, dotted with explanations and interruptions that often did not allow for participants to slip into flowing recollection. Delays between questions asked, their relayed translations, and the reverse translation of answers, seemed to open out gaps, spaces for loss so to speak, even for misrepresentation. On more than one occasion Lanzmann chided his colleague for not effectively translating what was being said – there was one specific occasion when a reference was made to “capital” in connection to the relative wealth of Jewish families in the local area, where Lanzmann noted its omission and demanded that its meaning be explained. Such inconsistencies and slippages seemed to imply the possibility of swathes of experience (information) slipping under the radar, or going undetected, perhaps in some way an acknowledgement of an inherently accepted shortfall embraced by the whole project. If, as Jacques Rancière suggests in the final chapter of The Future of the Image, Lanzmann’s task is to represent the “reality of the incredible, the equivalence of the real and the incredible,” (p129) then these mismatches might speak of, or emphasise, the seeming impossibility and relentless obligation that such an equivalence demands.

Lanzmann’s complex claims that Shoah is not a documentary but a work of art is difficult to wholly refute. As a ‘fiction of the real’ that does not necessarily attempt to be historically representational as such, the film actively engages with a more manipulative, and perhaps more powerful, agenda. Rancière suggests that Lanzmann does not remove the fact of the extermination in this artistic presentation – suggesting that it is not simply a case of having one at the expense of the other (as if an artwork immediately lost all claims to historicity or a certain validity, and vice versa…) – and that his task is to approach the unrepresentable, or the discourses that surround it, from a particular, and conscious, artistic vantage (however unstable some of those terms might be…). It seems clear that Lanzmann’s construction is absolutely deliberate – it assumes and manipulates countless available framings and juxtapositions – not just in cinematographic terms, but in the treatment of interviewees, the handling of oral testimony, the reenactments, use of imagery, etc. in service of a work whose scale is perhaps not as freely traversed by other means.

The reenactments are really interesting, and somewhat troubling, to watch. An article by Dominick LaCapra quotes Lanzmann: “To direct a frontal look at horror requires that one renounce distractions and escape-hatches, first the primary among them, the most falsely central, the question why, with the indefinite retinue of academic frivolities and dirty tricks that it ceaselessly induces.” ["Lanzmann's Shoah: 'Here There Is No Why'" - Dominick LaCapra, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1997), pp. 231-269] LaCapra comments that it seems odd for Lanzmann to reference a direct look when he avoids using archival footage or photographs, and posits that no look is more ‘frontal’ than that of there here and now – that of seeing a person remember, with all the untidy, unruly demands this might make on film – long, awkward silences, muddled expression, clouded memories and the distortions of distance, and so on. Another section in the Rancière text seems to concern similar emphasis on the materiality of the here and now as the tool for remembrance, where he suggests that any representation of these vanished events can only occur “through an action, a newly created fiction which begins in the here and now. It is through a confrontation between the words uttered here and now about what was and the reality that is materially present and absent in this place.” (Rancière – The Future of the Image, p127)

The instances where Lanzmann presses people to remember their experiences, and put them into words, are often difficult to watch. Abraham Bomba is interviewed whilst cutting a man’s hair in a crowded barbershop (referencing the vocation that saved his life in Treblinka) – a situation that, for one thing, seems intent on emphasising the near-impossibility of reconciliation between those recalled events and the ongoing demands of ‘normaility’, or workaday existence. Rancière identifies a similar discrepancies at work in the opening episodes, where Simon Srebnik’s is speaking in the clearing at Chelmno, where resemblances between scenes of now and then (which Rancière seems to see as a kind of shared tranquility, a pervading silence and the unspoken functionality of people standing at their posts, swallowed up as part of the machine) lay bare the “impossibility of adjusting today’s tranquility to yesterday’s.” (p128) This kind of ‘tapping into’ the past via the present, a kind of bridging between there here & now and the there & then, seems central to Lanzmann’s approach, and goes some way to justify his relentless patience with regard to his subjects – allowing the silence and the camera to induce the interviewees to do something, to drag something up, even involuntarily.

In particular, the barbershop scene seems cruelly theatrical. It appears specifically designed to exhaust Bomba, to split him in two between now and then, between there and here. The traumatic account he bravely tries to relate inevitably, as Lanzmann no doubt expects (or counts on), breaks down. There are appeals to camera, appeals to the interviewer just out of shot, to stop, to not continue. Lanzmann, of course, does not permit this, and instead allows the emotion to slowly, agonisingly, dissipate into the crowded shop. Lanzmann is patient enough to gain access to the ‘other side’ of traumatic crisis point – the period of calm, open exhaustion after the emotional storm. If there is no catharsis offered to the traumatised, is it because Lanzmann sees this process of catharsis as being worked through by, and for, the film, rather than any individual? The men in the shop (which was rented for the shooting of the scene), even the gentleman who’s hair is being cut, do not understand what is going on in their midst (the interview being in English), again mercilessly re-staging the clash of ignorance and morbid knowledge accompanying the mirrored event in the camps that Bomba relates. It is easy to resent Lanzmann’s pressing of Bomba, yet the interviewer here seems to occupy a strong position, an authorial vantage from where he must try to direct whatever proceedings he can in order to bring the ugliness to the light. Though it is no doubt problematic, and certainly difficult to watch, I don’t think that Lanzmann’s attitude is unkind, or unreasonable, but rather fully determined, aware of an enormous obligation, of a scope that he himself is only partially conscious of. You can sense the emotion, hidden out of frame, behind his concessional apology to Bomba, yet his response is an immediate and equally plaintive appeal back out into confused crucible of the shop: “You know we must do this” – a complex comment that, in such an artificial, reconstructed context, seems to give an indication of the scale of the task facing all participants, and extras, in the exchange.

The manner in which the witnesses constructed their testimonies was also fascinating. In both the barbershop scene and other scenes involving Bomba, conducted on a sun-filled terrace, the awkwardness in putting remembered events into words was made absolutely evident, and spoke most clearly of the traumatic processes these people were being subjected to. They seem cut off in language, smothered by it, as if it will not help them but only crowd them out. Just what kinds of resources can be drawn on to articulate these experiences? If, as Rancière writes, “(t)here is no appropriate language for witnessing,” (p126) it’s interesting to note the different ways participants appealed to language to continue breathing in front of the camera – how they inhabited words in order to allow themselves to maneuver though their memories and survive. Rancière seems to suggest that this is where the unrepresentable resides – in the the faltering testimonies, made awkward by language as much as clouded by memory, where each individual must come to terms with the “impossibility of an experience being told in its own appropriate language.” He goes on to say that “(w)here testimony has to express the experience of the inhuman, it naturally finds an already constituted language of becoming-inhuman, of an identity between human sentiments and non-human movements,” (p126) which seems to suggest, though I’m not sure, the availability of an aesthetic language of fiction, of literature, carefully constructed and yet familiar enough as to be everyday, through which our remembrances are conveyed as though through the framework structures of storytelling and artistic sensibilities – aesthetic methods of pinning events together in language, much like the construction of Shoah itself.

Given that the film relies so much of the testimonies of individuals and does not use archive footage, the status and treatment of documents or artefacts was also a point of discussion. This was often linked to the occasions when Lanzmann conducted interviews with people in their homes, or occasionally on the threshold. More often than not it seemed that Lanzmann’s first comments concerned his subjects’ domestic arrangements – for example the beauty of their houses, often linked to later comments about their Jewish connections and the lines of previous ownership. This emphasis on people’s private spaces, their realms of safety or sanctuary, no doubt insinuates just what it might be to lose it all, to have everything taken away, and there often seems to be a latent hostility in many of the exchanges, as well, of course, as genuine affection, sadness and regret. Given the scarcity, the appearance of original documents and archive images gained a certain privilege in the visual economy of the film. One of the most striking example involved on the men from Corfu, when he described the loss of his family members whilst holding an array of photographs in his hands.

The conditions in which such images appear in the film is worth considering. For Lanzmann, the images seem to require a kind of material contextualisation, so that they are embedded into the surface material of the film (the here & now) in such a way that they do not protrude from its surface or overtake it completely. If an image were to assume the whole screen, reaching to the edges of the frame and ejecting all presence of the ‘present’ from the film’s continuity, this will have shifted the focus of the work into another area, and one that Lanzmann seems determined to avoid. The aim seems to be to keep the images at least partially submerged, to keep them ‘in the room’, so to so to speak, not allowing them to engage another world, a dreamworld, that the viewer can enter into. The clasp of the hands, holding the photographs almost like a group of playing cards, is very much a gesture of keeping the images sunken – sunken in the present, kept active in the world of the living. Another instance was when Lanzmann is at a table with the American historian Raul Hilberg, discussing the Nazi train schedules and holding the copy of an original document. Again the document was seen being handled, obscured by hands, kept moving (this is how I recollect it – perhaps I’m wrong here?), not allowing us to forget that this artefact is materially present, part of the here and now as much as it is part of the there and then.

I was thinking that there might be something interesting in thinking about the portrayal and function of private spaces in the film, but there are so many other aspects that we talked about – not least concerning the films editing and cyclical structure – an approach that doesn’t allow any closure, but isolates the film in an implied endlessness.

During Toni-Lynn’s presentation, I also found myself thinking about Lanzmann’s immediate repetition/questioning of “to the sky?” when Simon Srebnik is talking of the oven flames at Chelmno – a slightly poetic phrasing that Lanzmann immediate picks up on, though I’m not sure if his reaction is motivated by encouragement, incredulity or recognition…