This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the Nazi party, which was dissolved in 1945. But it is also seeing an unprecedented rise in open neo-Nazi sympathizers and saluters throughout the world, along with Holocaust deniers and growing far-right parties, notably in Germany. It is in this context that the Berlin Film Festival is re-screening Claude Lanzmann’s mammoth landmark aimed at preserving collective memory of the Holocaust, Shoah, along with a new documentary by French filmmaker Guillaume Ribot, constructed entirely of outtakes that didn’t make it into Lanzmann’s chef d’oeuvre.
Like Shoah (though of course on a much smaller scale), the cumulative effect of Ribot’s painstaking work lies in the power and cold clarity of undeniable facts. He has called Shoah an “interrogation [that] forces us to ask questions. We’re not supposed to cry.” But throughout this 96-minute documentary, there were many scenes – especially those showing images of trains pulling rickety old carriages through verdant Polish forests on their way to the extermination camp of Treblinka – in which a pin could have been heard dropping in the screening room. And when the film was over, people took a very long time to rouse themselves, put on their coats and head for the exit.
To be clear, there is nothing earth-shaking here that was wrongly left out of Shoah. Compared to Lanzmann’s original edit, this is a small sampler that will hopefully reach wider audiences than those able to track down and watch the 9½ hour version, which the director worked on from 1973 to 1985. In this anniversary year, and in this frightening political moment, festival outings are assured, along with scattered arthouse release.
Ribot worked with archives on Lanzmann’s unused material, selecting striking key moments which he scanned in 4K from the original 16mm prints and then restored. Most of the scenes are familiar ones like the train chugging through the forest, and many eyewitness interviews with survivors like the SS guard Franz Suchomel, Richard Glazar who escaped from the Treblinka camp, and the barber Bomba who was forced to cut the hair of Jewish women in the gas chamber. In a moving and revealing finale, we see Claude Lanzmann in a state of emotional exhaustion rest his head on the chest of Yitzhak Zuckerman, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and who says, “Claude, if you could lick my heart, it would poison you.”
Perhaps the longest scene in the film involves a failure. After finding survivors of the camps and persuading them to drag their bitter memories in front of his camera, he decides that the film will not be complete without the testimony of a ranking member of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, or Mobile Killing Units who notoriously carried out genocide on the Jews. In previously unseen footage, Lanzmann (who has a fake passport for the occasion with a non-Jewish name) prepares for the meeting in his hotel room like a Cold War spy, strapping on a microphone-transmitter to secretly capture the confessions of the Nazi officer in his comfortable suburban home. The friendly, ordinary-looking Lanzmann makes a fearless attempt to trap the man into talking to him, all the while sending audio and video signals to a van parked outside the house. Seen from the director’s POV, it is a frightening moment that demonstrates to what lengths he was prepared to go for his film, even putting himself in danger of arrest.
Lanzmann is five years into his film — which included international, often fruitless searches for financing — when he arrives in Poland driving a rented Russian jalopy. He knows the death camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmo, Sobibor, Treblinka and others) have been torn down and he is personally convinced there is nothing there that can help him finish his project to document the mass death of Jews during the war. Ribot’s voice recites, in Lanzmann’s own words, “I wanted to film, but all I had was nothingness.” The success of Ribot’s film is to show how, out of this despair, arose a profound stimulus and a new point of view on the whole film, which today it is a valued part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.
Director, screenwriter: Guillaume Ribot
Producers: Estelle Fialon, Dominique Lanzmann
Editing: Svetlana Vaynblat
Sound design: Jean-Pierre Halbwachs, Vincent Arnardi
Production companies: Les Films du Poisson (France), Les Films Aleph (France)
World sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Special)
In French, English, German, Polish
94 minutes
