Shoah

This short study of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary ‘Shoah’ about the Nazi holocaust - a film over 9 hours long which largely consists of interviews interspersed with landscape shots - appears as part of the British Film Institute’s series of short illustrated critical introductions to cinema classics. These BFI studies are attractive in format, although over-priced, and it’s a series which is often conservative, populist and Hollywood-centric in its choice of what constitutes a movie ‘classic’. The authors are often drawn from cultural spheres other than media or film studies. Literature academic Sue Vice’s study of ‘Shoah’, a film which lasts more than nine hours, is 98 pages long (the BFI volume on James Cameron’s ‘Titanic’ gets 142 pages).Vice’s book supplies a short introduction to ‘Shoah’ with a useful appendix that provides a four-page breakdown of its sections, listing those interviewed, the subjects, the settings and the themes or aspects of the genocide. Her table of contents doesn’t include the timings of the individual sections, which is an unfortunate omission where such an extraordinarily long film is concerned. There are slips, such as a glaring typo on the second page of her first chapter, and inaccuracies (she refers to “Beth Shemen forest” - it should be Ben Shemen).Vice acknowledges that ‘Shoah’ is a controversial film and defends it against its various detractors. These range from Jean-Luc Godard, who remarked that Lanzmann’s documentary “showed nothing at all”, to Pauline Kael, who found it sluggish in pace, exhausting to watch, manipulative, and who dismissed it as “a long moan”. Other objections include Lanzmann’s limited perspective - his title ‘Shoah’ suggests breadth but his documentary is very partial in its subject matter. In Lanzmann’s hands the Nazi genocide is exclusively Jewish in its choice of victims, with only one aspect of the genocide focused on, namely the use of gas for mass killing. Nazi mass murder of Jews involving other methods and the killing of other victims - the disabled, gays, gypsies, socialists and communists - exist outside his framing. Although framed as a documentary the power of ‘Shoah’ lies in its poetic qualities as a mournful epic of memory, absence and the passage of time. Oddly, Vice does not discuss the film stock used by Lanzmann, which greatly helped in giving the film its dense, faded, ‘archival’ quality (a stark contrast to the ‘clean’ images of modern digital film-making).Vice’s book has been criticised for its shaky understanding of the evolving historiography of the Holocaust. In the twenty-first century, our understanding of the mechanics of the Nazi genocide as well as the sociology of German society is much more nuanced than earlier histories. There was also a tendency to represent the genocide as a unique event beyond the bounds of human comprehension. Cinema, too, has evolved, and Vice has been criticised for her evident ignorance of the film ‘Partisans of Vilna’ (1986), which Michael Berkowitz has argued is in many ways a better film than ‘Shoah’. There are other films which Vice appears unaware of but which might have been mentioned in the context of Holocaust representation in cinema. The Jewish director Michael Winner’s “Swinging Sixties” movie ‘I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname’ (1967) has a plot which includes the use of documentary footage of corpses in an extermination camp, provocatively inserted into a commercial for home-movie cameras by a disillusioned advertising executive. The intention is to shock and disgust and provoke anger; instead the advert is acclaimed as brilliant and awarded a prize. Winner’s point is to show how even genocide can be turned into a marketable commodity. It’s a film which seems ahead of its time in its representation of how even the fact of mass extermination can be utilised for base purposes.More problematic is Vice’s somewhat uncritical approach to Lanzmann, who granted her an interview before his death. She mentions his autobiography but not the hostile reception it received from reviewers who found it egocentric and self-mythologising. Vice accepts without demur Lanzmann’s foregrounding of himself as an interviewer in his documentary films, casually remarking that “he often appears, of necessity, on screen”. She blandly describes ‘Tsahal’ as “his film on the Israeli army,” which is a bit like calling Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ “a film about a political rally”. Lanzmann’s enthusiastic Zionism is never addressed nor is the ethical questions it raises in relation to Holocaust memorial (as even a lightweight director like Winner perceived, the latter’s evocation and application can be morally dubious). Vice breezily describes how Lanzmann “flew with a daredevil Israeli fighter pilot, while making his 1994 film Tsahal”, perhaps indicating her own perspective. Vice's book briefly mentions 'Route 181', which laconically replicates some of the scenes from 'Shoah' from a Palestinian perspective, but this film seems to be no longer available. Her book ends with Lansmann's critique of it.Lanzmann’s hardline enthusiasm for Israel would not by itself be of direct relevance to ‘Shoah’ were it not that it bleeds into his film. Ten of his witnesses are Israeli Jews and they get the last word. At one point a connection is made between a site of genocide in Europe and a forest in Israel. The viewer is informed that the Germans planted pines over a death camp to camouflage its traces, whereas in Israel “That’s the charm of our forests: silence and beauty.” This is one of the troubling moments in the film, with neither Lanzmann nor Vice acknowledging that just as forestation was used by the Nazis to suppress evidence of a crime, the only state in the modern world which also uses this method is Israel. To compound the irony the forest which supplies the backdrop to this scene in ‘Shoah’ is precisely one of these sites of violent erasure, with the Palestinian villages of Dayr Abu Salama, Khirbat al-Duhayriyya, Jimzu, Khirbat Zakariya and Haditha wiped from existence and from the consciousness of Israelis. You will not learn this from Vice’s book, which is good on the aesthetics of ‘Shoah’ but unsatisfactory on the wider issue of ethics and history a film of this sort raises.She omits all mention of Jewish writers like Joel Kovel, who have challenged the way in which the Shoah has been used as a blank cheque to justify the Jewish settler state (which, arguably, is one of Lanzmann’s buried agendas in his masterpiece). Nor does she consider the historiography of genocide or appear aware of writers like Sven Lindquist, who regarded the Nazi genocide as rooted in much wider European practises in nineteen century Africa and who pointed out that the Nazi genocide was actually the second German mass killing of an ethnic group (the Herero people, exterminated by the German state in Southwest Africa in 1904). That ‘Shoah’ had its première at the Théâtre de l’Empire is a grisly irony, in the context of Lindquist’s study of European imperial mass killings. This said, Vice’s monograph a useful short introduction to ‘Shoah’, albeit it flawed by some problematic framing in the areas of film, history, and ethics.