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By PAUL BRENNER
In a staggering moment of
horrific complacency in Claude Lanzmann's
monumental nine-and-a-half hour documentary about
the Holocaust, a peasant who worked the fields
near the Treblinka death camp describes how he
adjusted to hearing the agonizing screams of
terror as Nazi SS slaughtered train car loads of
Eastern European Jews: "At first, it was
unbearable. Then you get used to it."
Lanzmann's triumphant achievement in "Shoah" is
that the film transcends the forms of documentary
and historical record to show how banality can
make even the most horrible and vile acts of
cold-blooded murder an acceptable part of everyday
life.
Lanzmann spent eleven years interviewing
concentration camp survivors, Nazi commandants and
eyewitnesses to the mass destruction of six
million European Jews during World War II and he
simply allows the testimonies to speak for
themselves. No voiceover narration is employed and
no archival footage is used. Instead, Lanzmann
relies on stately and meditative contemporary
shots of Auschwitz and Treblinka and of creaky,
old trains heading down the rusted railroad tracks
of the concentration camps to bridge the interview
sequences like long, slow sighs. But the film's
inexorable forward movement is solely through the
interviews and the witnesses' responses to
Lanzmann's insistent questioning.
If God is in the details, so too is Evil, and
Lanzmann hammers at the minutiae and specifics
from his subjects (intricate descriptions of the
timetables of the death trains and asking
questions such as "When did you arrive in
Treblinka? Was it August 20th or 24th?" and "How
fast did the vans go?") in order to lay bare the
businesslike processes and the impersonality of
the memos, records, and diagrams that led the
Nazis to create their orderly plan for mass
murder. As one witness remarks, "No one shouted.
Everyone went about their work." Death and The
Final Solution are never stated but disguised
(words in documents like "process," "procedure,"
"the load," and "disinfection squads" are the code
words for "killing" and "extermination"). Lanzmann
employs the interview format and the sheer length
of the film to create a sense in the viewer of how
the Jewish Question was formulated to its
horrible, logical conclusions through a seemingly
mundane bureaucracy.
But as "Shoah" reveals the logic of mankind at its
most vile and loathsome it also celebrates the
sanctity and drive for life even under the most
terrible conditions. A survivor remarks, at one
point in the film, "Hope lingers in man as long as
he lives."
Given the length of the film, the extras are
minimal -- merely a Lanzmann biography and the
choice of selecting an audio track in either
French or English. But extras are not needed. The
quiet intensity of the film in overwhelming and
after viewing it one needs to just sit quietly and
reflect. "Shoah" is not a film of archaic
attitudes but shouts to be seen as warning for our
own fragile and menacing times. |
