Srebnik at Chelmno
Problems of Representation:
Strategies of Re-enactment in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah
Even if Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah were not 9½ hours long, didn’t take 11 years to make, and wasn’t culled from 350 hours of footage, it would remain a remarkable film for a number or reasons. There is no voiceover, no non-diagetic music, and, apart from a few photographs that the Corfu Jews show the camera, no archive footage in this Holocaust film. Instead, a long sequence of scrolling text at the opening foreshadows the extraordinary slowness of the long journey on which the audience is about to embark. A particular tone is set from the start-there will be no rushing through this film; the audience will move with it, and travel on a circuit through a particular chapter of history and amidst the memory of witnesses; around people and through places, as if on a relentless, hypnotic, slow-motion centrifuge navigating through time and space.
Rather than using newsreel footage or a chronologically-unfolding narrative to tell the story, Lanzmann’s treatment of history is obsessively circular; he works primarily with witnesses, asking and re-asking questions that require his subjects to revisit their pasts, the events that haunt them, and in some cases, to carry out certain actions they once performed within the contexts of their traumatic pasts. “We have to do it,” Lanzmann says on one occasion to Abraham Bomba, a reticent Holocaust survivor who struggles to hold back his tears, though it is never made clear as to why, exactly, Bomba must recall these events for Lanzmann’s camera. The answer is implicit: it is not about the audience understanding the Holocaust-for Lanzmann this is an impossibility; it is about getting the facts straight, dialogue, and bearing witness to the effects of trauma years after its original occurrence. In The Obscenity of Understanding he writes:
…[Shoah] is a quest, a search for truth, in much the same way that psychoanalysis consists in an investigation of truth; and both are a search for truth through the act of talking, through dialogue…. And the process of generating the truth, of bringing it forth, is contingent, both in psychoanalysis and in the film, on a presence, the presence of the listener on the screen and behind the couch.
Holocaust theorists Marianne Hirsch and her partner Leo Spitzer describe Lanzmann as an analyst who “brings each of [the survivors] to the point of re-experiencing their most profound encounters with the Nazi death machinery.” Yet, they admit that this reading is perforated when one considers the delicate ground Lanzmann is treading when he asks his subjects to re-enact for the camera specific behaviors from their harrowing pasts. If, as Lanzmann states, Shoah is not a documentary, but a “fiction of the real,” that it is a document about the “suspense of the investigation” complemented by another sense of discovery, which he calls “historical,” and the film is a co-merging of these two elements, then how, if not in an effort to “understand,” does Lanzmann feel ethically justified in potentially re-traumatizing the survivors he interviews? In other words, if, as he says, the “iron law” he clung to while making Shoah was not about “understanding,” per se, but about watching a reliving of the past in the present-that Shoah is “not a documentary but a performance” where the witness not only provides testimony but also “self-rendingly relives the traumatic suffering of the past” (236)-then it seems that there is something cruel about encouraging survivors to “act out” for the camera if they are not also provided with any means through which to “work through” aspects of their traumatic pasts.
This process of re-enacting or repeating scenes stored in one’s subconscious in order to work through them is what Freud terms, and Lacan builds on, as “rememoration.” Lanzmann is not a psychoanalyst, so he is not prepared to deal with any new trauma that might occur as old traumas resurface. It is one thing for Lanzmann to creatively edit the film in a way that mirrors the cyclical psychoanalytic process of rumination, repetition, revelation, and the “ever-deepening circles” around a traumatic event-a process that cannot really take place without taking time (which, for this film, takes 9 ½ hours)-but it is quite another thing for Lanzmann, on camera, to provoke the survivors like an amateur psychoanalyst. Presumably unintentionally, he appears at times to be objectifying his survivor-subjects.
If the purpose of Lanzmann’s quest is, as he says, the “incarnation, actual reliving, or compulsive “acting out” of the past-particularly its traumatic suffering-in the present,” then David Denby is probably correct when he says that Shoah is a film “about history as it is remembered as well as made-an account…of memory…forgetting,” and repression. If, as Lanzmann says, no “knowledge” can be acquired from or through this film, then what is the purpose of potentially re-traumatizing the survivors? Why is he casting the survivors in roles that require them to relive disturbing episodes from their pasts? And how does he feel justified in asking his audience to collaborate with him in observing the objectification of these survivors?
In an attempt to tap Simon Srebnik’s subconscious memory at the site of his original trauma, Lanzmann flies him from Israel to Poland so that he can film him at the geographic site of the original incursion-the ex-Nazi Death Camp where Srebnik was shot and left for dead at the age of 13. The opening shot consists of a staged scenario where Lanzmann sets Srebnik in a small boat and, according to the film’s introductory text, captures this one-time boy singer drifting slowly down the river.
Situated behind trees on the bank of the river, the camera pans from left to right, following the slender rowing boat in which Srebnik sits. Through the camera’s placement, the audience is put in the position of a riverbank spectator, watching from a safe distance as an unidentified boats-man paddles the survivor along the river. With a lifeless and vulnerable expression on his face, Srebnik sits at the stern with his back facing the direction he is traveling, his hands half-closed on his lap. The river-the starting point for a number or classic stories-is Lanzmann’s point of departure after a two-minute long sequence of scrolling introductory text. As the source for the film’s journey, it is fitting that Srebnik should be facing where he has come from-this is a journey into history, and one upon which Srebnik seems reluctant to embark. Watching the rowboat make its way up the tranquil river generates a contemplative mood, yet the juxtaposition of the disturbing subject matter with the naturally beautiful mis-en-scène evokes a sense of apprehension in the audience for the long and arduous journey upon which they too are about to embark.
Held for a long take in a medium close-up, the next scene shows an incredulous Srebnik walking silently along a path and then stopping, staring, and saying very little: “I can’t believe I’m here. No I just can’t believe I’m here.” Lanzmann then cuts to an extreme wide shot, and the viewer realizes that Srebnik is walking through the site of Chelmno, the one-time Nazi Death Camp where he was left for dead. Oblivious to his surroundings, he walks along the memorial border; it is the behavior of a boy, and his figure appears dwarfed by his surroundings.
Even though Srebnik is brought to Chelmno, he is not prompted to feel a certain way, and there is no line of inquiry within which he is asked to frame his responses at the camp itself. Without being asked specific questions, Srebnik’s reactions to the surroundings are completely his own, and he seems at times both re-traumatized and oddly unmoved by the return. It is with apparent discomfort, however, that he frequently glances toward the camera, as if pleading to be released. Presumably, he is looking at Lanzmann, who is most likely near the camera, to cue him. The effect, however, is that he is appealing to the audience for help.
To his credit, Lanzmann captures both his subjects’ speech and their silence-he films people remembering, and these images of silence convey the effects of trauma on the human psyche. Most documentarians usually start a new line of inquiry or end an interview if a subject stops talking for any significant period of time, but Lanzmann does not. As a one-time journalist, he seems to have developed a fascination for the tension and inner turmoil of an interview gone quiet-he is interested in the process of recollection that sometimes generates “acting out,” and this kind of result takes time-it takes patience. He not only keeps the 16mm film camera rolling, but often uses long, demanding takes in their entirety. In the final edit, we witness a persistent and sometimes obstinate Lanzmann. His refusal to cut away is unusual, not only in Holocaust documentary, but in traditional documentary filmmaking in general.
Without providing any instructions that the audience is aware of, Lanzmann tacitly expects Srebnik to do something, anything, for the camera. Knowing that the camera is pointed directly at him, Srebnik, like many of the film’s subjects, may well have felt duty-bound to reveal himself, to “perform”-even in silence. This silence is something that Lanzmann cultivates, and his use of it is complex, sometimes oppressive, and always provocative. Through it, he allows his subjects to carve their own ways, and these places seem, for Lanzmann, the spaces of memory and before language. These silences give the subjects space for “rememoration,” which, for better or worse, obliges the audience and filmmaker to witness traumatic memory as an active, live event. Lanzmann’s use of silence requires the viewer to reflect on what is immediately happening or has just taken place in the film-by not cutting away to another image or topic when things start to slow down, he prohibits the kind of escape that is common in conventional documentaries. Dealing, as it does, with both subjective and objective history, Shoah presents contradictory versions of events from the perspectives of perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and historians. The film’s silences allow the audience to consider and question these contradictions, and to reflect upon their own understanding and misunderstanding of the evolution of Holocaust history.
As a documentary filmmaker, Lanzmann understands that there is an important distinction between reading survivor and witness testimony and listening to and watching someone tell his or her story. There is something significant about seeing Srebnik remember-something, perhaps, more important than an audience’s attempt to understand the trauma of his past. Maybe Lanzmann has discovered that it is within these moments of silence and quiet response that the least amount of artifice exists, and that this is where the most unspeakable part of history resides.
After the sequence at the one-time Death Camp, Lanzmann cuts back to the river, where the rowboat is now unobstructed between two trees, and Srebnik, in full view, is no longer singing a Polish folk tune. Instead, he begins “Wenn die Soldaten,” one of the Prussian war songs he was purportedly taught by the SS as a young boy in the camp. Captured with a long lens, the lush green countryside that surrounds Srebnik is accentuated by the Fuji stock on which the film is shot; his singing is slightly masked by the gentle sound of the water, the rural ambience, and the distance between him and the microphone. The local church is visible in the background, and, according to the transcript, the initially disembodied voiceovers are those of Chelmno “villagers.” The juxtaposition of these four elements-the river, Srebnik, the church, and the voiceovers-suggest that Srebnik’s singing is being used in part to catalyze the memories of the Chelmno residents. One of the anonymous voices says: “When I heard him again, my heart beat faster, because what happened here…was a murder. I really relived what happened.”
Disappearing and reappearing as he floats behind a cluster of five slender tree trunks, the camera struggles with the obstructions, suggesting an unbridgeable gap that exists between Srebnik, trauma, history, and the viewer. Srebnik emerges once again, ironically set against a spectacularly peaceful and picturesque landscape: “Lanzmann’s camera violates the stillness; [yet] he cannot make the ground crack, heave, and yield up its dead, but he can at least disturb the insensibility of nature.” Our knowledge of Srebnik’s past in this place, juxtaposed with his impassive singing, puts the audience on edge. He owes his survival to his singing ability; yet his survival, as we observe it in the film, seems partial at best, and is perhaps destabilized by the way Lanzmann captures him as half-man/half-boy, and in some ways only part human. In this uncanny scene, Srebnik’s wounds seem so fresh, “keenly inscribed…[and] present in a haunting timelessness.”
Srebnik’s unexpected survival eerily transforms Shoah’s otherwise pictorial opening sequence. His presence reveals an absence-a violent rupture-emphasizing a past that some of the film’s interviewees are rather indifferent about recalling. He is an uncanny figure whose monotone singing is trance-like against the serene and idyllic backdrop. In medium close-up, his facial expression appears stolid, perhaps vacant, somewhat boyish, and not the least bit empowered by a visit to Chelmno. Moreover, the sequence seems to suggest that something essential in this man has died at the site of the incursion, and that his loss at the point of rupture is something neither Lanzmann, nor re-enactment, nor film itself is capable of resurrecting. Srebnik is only “performing” something from his past-simply going through the motions-an action that is simply part of the self that died at Chelmno.
Lanzmann’s psychoanalytic approach to re-enactment complicates both his, and by extension the audience’s, relationship to Srebnik. One cannot help but ask what, if anything, is in this for Simon Srebnik? It does not seem to be given much consideration. Rather than offering alternatives for positive behavior or ways of dealing with the scenario, Lanzmann arguably re-victimizes Srebnik when he has him relive the past through singing the song taught to him by his past victimizers. It would be one thing if Lanzmann chose to document a “working through” of past trauma, if Srebnik’s revelations led to a modicum of personal catharsis, but Lanzmann does not approach his subject with this constructive possibility in mind. Instead, he has Srebnik perform an element from his past in a way that only allows Srebnik to “act out”-”working through” is not an option. Granted, Lanzmann does not chain the survivor’s ankles together, dress him in rags, and put him in a boat with someone dressed as an SS Guard; still, he is, in other ways, objectifying Srebnik, and, given what is being asked of him, one wonders what support might have been available in that small Polish village if Srebnik broke down into psychic shock. It is not clear from the film what Lanzmann is trying to communicate: are the survivors damaged beyond repair, or tough as nails? Either way, there are times when Lanzmann might be inflicting needless damage; his Jewish subjects are accidental survivors of the Nazi system; by agreeing to be interviewed, some of these individuals end up becoming re-victimized, and are by default, casualties of the Lanzmann system.
Although some of Lanzmann’s interview strategies raise ethical questions, his work in the area of Holocaust cinema remains essential viewing. If this comment seems at odds with what precedes it, this is simply because highlighting what is wrong with Shoah can persist for only so long, and criticisms of the film, usually start with attacks on Lanzmann himself. It would be a fool’s errand to ignore Lanzmann’s perseverance-his intelligent, clever, and genuine line of enquiry-the dedication of his crew, and the integrity of the survivors’ testimony. These elements, combined with the breadth of footage, 11 years, and a stubborn Lanzmann himself led to what has been described by Simone de Beauvoir as a “masterpiece.” How critical is it that Lanzmann has been described as a rather obnoxious man? This would not be the first time that a great work was made by a difficult or insufferable person.
For now, it remains that Shoah illustrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of Holocaust representation in documentary cinema. It reminds us that all films-narratives and documentaries alike-are a construction: the picture is edited from hours and hours of reconfigured footage; some scenes are merely “constructed,” while others are staged outright; and witnesses are plagued by the passing of time, their testimonies colored by continued reflection, historical analysis, and subsequent experiences. Still, Lanzmann’s self-imposed “iron law,” and his assumption that the audience will fail to “understand” anything about the Holocaust (either through Shoah or otherwise) seem unreasonably contrary to any position, such as Primo Levi’s assertion, that accepts “even partial understanding” as valuable “in the attempt to resist tendencies that led to, or were manifest in, the Nazi genocide.” In any case, although by no means the first or the last to be made, for better or worse, Lanzmann’s epic film sets a standard against which all Holocaust films are measured, and it is difficult to imagine what the Holocaust film canon would look like today without this seminal piece of work.
Denby, David. “Out of Darkness.” New York Magazine (28 October 1985): 130.
“The Obscenity of Understanding”: 475.
Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. “Gendered Translations: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.” In Miriam Cooke and Angela Woolacott, eds. Gendering War Talk. Princeton, UP: 16.
Quotes taken from Lanzmann’s seminar on Shoah – page 142-143
“The Obscenity of Understanding”: 478.
Shoshana Felman from “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann.” American Imago Vol. 48, No. 4 (1991): 478.
Lanzmann has been described as using a “trick of the camera” to make Srebnik look small against the backdrop of this, camp, but having been there myself, I am not sure what special lenses the filmmaker might be using. The place is huge, and one of Lanzmann’s car tracking shots later in the film illustrates this fact.
See opening essay in transcript of Shoah by de Beauvoir.
See Chapter 14 in Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of Evil. New York, Harper: 1999. The author describes a bizarre meeting with Lanzmann at his Paris apartment.
