Shoah (1985)
Claude Lanzmann
English/German/Hebrew/Polish/Yiddish/French
“So you want to die. But that’s senseless. Your death won’t give us back our lives. That’s no way. You must get out of here alive. You must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us.”
Let’s make a few things clear first. Shoah (1985) is an essential film. Essential not for us to see it, but for it to exist. Even if the world fails to take notice of it, even if audiences don’t see it, it will remain as glorious and as vital as any historical monument or religious document. It’s not a film that you merely watch, but one which you visit. Running for over nine hours, Shoah opens up at its own pace, never bothering about its destination or about its function as a film. Aided by a couple of cinematographers and a translator, Claude Lanzmann, a protégé of Jean-Paul Sartre and the director of the film, meets the survivors of the Holocaust, – of Auschwitz-Birkenau, of Treblinka, of Chelmno and of the Warsaw ghetto – neutral witnesses in rural Poland and even ex-Nazi officials and workers who were in some way related to the events at the camps, striking up conversations that seem utterly banal but which eventually develop the atmosphere of the film. Apparently, it took Lanzmann over a decade to complete the film and this determination shows. If you are looking for something close to courtroom transcripts or architectural details, look elsewhere. Lanzmann does not pretend to give a fair chance to the SS officers, nor does he try to tell us what actually happened out there. He takes a stand, for sure. Once you take its premise for granted, you realize that Shoah is more than a film. It’s a project – of preservation and of education.
One can’t clearly assign a purpose to the film, for Shoah’s scope of research is far from limited. One moment you have a survivor passionately recalling those years whereas in the other, you see Lanzmann taking a tour of the idyllic Polish countryside. The film does not even raise questions, leave alone answering them. Lanzmann gives us ample time to reflect upon the film, to go beyond its written perimeters, to pose our own questions and to review our own political, moral and social stances. However, one thing that is certain is that Lanzmann, here, is attempting to tell the world once and for all that the Holocaust did take place. Every question, every conversation and every development seems like a reply to the claims of the Holocaust Revisionists. He seems more interested in establishing the verity of the notorious event than illustrating its horrors. And this is perhaps the reason why Revisionists are thoroughly critical of Lanzmann and his movie (Here is an elaborate Revisionist review of the film questioning it using its own testimonies).
The greatest problem that Shoah poses to its deniers is the fact that it deals with the Holocaust and not a holocaust. It is said that Lanzmann has fabricated and misrepresented certain details that would be oblivious to foreign eyes. That, I feel, is really an irrelevant issue over here. Shoah is essentially like a Werner Herzog film, only that the subject that the director is handling is too sensitive and researched upon to impose an artist’s vision. Surely, Shoah would not lose even an iota of its sheen even if it were to be declared as purely fictional. If what Lanzmann is trying is to arrive at a greater truth, unbound by the flow of time, by betraying reality to a minor extent, then I don’t see any reason why this film should be berated. It is not as much important to know what exactly happened as it is to understand what is claimed to have happened should not happen. That is to say, it is not a question of our response to a historical truth as it is of our action to an eternal (and now imminent) possibility.
The more I learn about the Holocaust, the more I tend to admire Salo (1975). I never could really digest Pasolini’s vision when I first watched the film, but especially after Shoah, I think I am able to see what Pasolini was arriving at. The conversations with the SS officers in Shoah indicate the sheer industrial nature of the whole operation. Prisoners are called “pieces”, gassing them is known as “processing” and the camp itself, dubbed as the “production line of death”. Everything here is commodified and reduced to dispassionate scientific terms. The extravagance of the entire process effaces any trace of individuality that the victims may have had. As the conversations regularly show us, the bigger problem for the SS was not the threat of a rebellion, but the logistics of the project that they had undertaken. Why Shoah (and also the work of the Shoah Foundation, with its 120,000 hours of footage) is special is partly because that it reviews a large-scale political issue in terms of personal tragedies. Its testimonies replace homogenized statistics and body count, which only serve to alienate us more from the event and hence be complacent about it, with intimate accounts that remind us of the value of each life.
Shoah arises out of a series of critical choices that Lanzmann has taken. There is not one shot of historical footage or one real photograph of the camp form the World War years in the film. Instead, he builds his non-linear narrative purely out of first hand accounts and interrogations. For most time, Lanzmann is content with either showing us the faces of the witnesses in extreme close up as they talk or dwell on the now-serene landscape of Treblinka, Auschwitz and Birkenau. Those who have seen Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955), which is ironically, but without doubt, a big inspiration for this film, will see Lanzmann’s move as being cynical. If Lanzmann’s suggesting anything at all in these dead times, it must be that this fascism is not a phantom that is dead and buried but one that lives and breathes among us in some form or the other. Lanzmann’s reinforces this idea through his small talks with the townsfolk in Poland, where (like in so many other countries) religion seems to be a clear standard of judgment. One resident sees Poles and Jews as mutually exclusive sects while some don’t seem to regret much about what transpired.
Having watched Shoah, one is only skeptical about the effectiveness of the work of the Shoah Visual History Foundation that Spielberg founded after the making of Schindler’s List (1993, which sometimes looks merely like the visual illustration of these testimonies despite the overall excellence of the film). You see, the camera has strange effects on the consciousness of the people in front of it. While Lanzmann captures these people while they are disarmed and engaged in their daily lives, hence tapping honest and unforced emotions (of the witnesses and ours), the Foundation’s work relies on consciously filmed interviews amidst a studio-like officious atmosphere. As a result, there is bound to be considerable difference in these testimonies and emotional impacts that they will have. But having said that, one must also acknowledge the nobility of both the missions, despite their outcomes, keeping in mind the immense sociological impact that these documents will have in the decades to come, years after the death of the last survivor. As one of the witnesses in the Foundation’s video says: “It’s not a question of forgiving or forgetting, it is a question of education”.
I don’t think there is not much that one could write about Shoah, for it is a film that is more experiential than cerebral. One would only end up talking about Holocaust if he were to talk about the film and miss the whole point of the film. It attempts to recreate the same atmosphere that persisted then, without resorting to meaningless photos and records, in order to make us feel the event rather than philosophize in hindsight. However, unlike many a movie made about the Holocaust, this one does not sell misery. Nor does it overload us with information as in history books. Instead, it tries to take us back to the dreadful period, ripping off our smug and comfortable perception of it acquired through scratchy B&W videos. There is much magic in Shoah that is as precious only when seen. This is manifest when you feel the air of uneasiness as Simon Srebnik, the miraculous survivor of Chelmno stands among Christians, who go on to subtly glorify themselves. Or when you notice the irony that the prison guards of the camps are now in a state of self-imposed exile. Or in the fact that Abraham Bomba, the barber who had to shave off the women’s hair at Treblinka, is still a barber, but by free will.
Chantal Akerman’s most famous film gives away all that is factual about it in its name itself. The rest of it follows what the titular Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) does in this 23, Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles house of hers, over a three day period in almost in its entirety. Using completely stationery cameras, Akerman creates a claustrophobic document of life in its most mundane form. Even with a screen time of over three hours, there isn’t much in the movie that could be fit into something called plot. That, precisely, is Akerman’s intention. Details are given with extreme reluctance and in exceedingly small measures (with hardly 10 minutes of spoken dialogue). On the first day, we witness Jeanne ritualistically moving about in her house, switching on and off the room lights, cooking potatoes for her obedient son, arranging tables, doing the dishes and making the bed. She earns by selling herself during the afternoons in her very house. All this is done by the book, if there ever was one.
It wouldn’t be unfair to call Jeanne Dielman an experimental film. Where other films that deal with similar theme of urban alienation tend to bend towards the cerebral side, Jeanne Dielman is more experiential. At any point in the film, once the viewer gathers everything there is to an image, like Tarr’s movies, fatigue sets in. We start experiencing time as it is, undiluted. In other words, we begin taking part in Jeanne’s life by experiencing the savage inertia of time. The only difference is that she is oblivious to it while we, possessing knowledge of the artificial and transitory nature of cinema, are not. Jeanne doesn’t pass through life. She lets life pass through her. Not once does she show signs of emotional fatigue. She is insensitive to her condition much more than her cerebral counterparts. Except for one sequence at a button store, where she shows clear indications of mental derailment, there apparently is no outlet for her emotions at all. Apart from the perfunctory conversations with her son and the occasional visit by the neighbour, who asks Jeanne to take care of her baby (who could well be considered a miniature Jeanne) from time to time, Jeanne is completely cut off (at times literally, in the frame) from the world.
The only hope for Jeanne to snap out of this vicious loop comes in the form of the final sequence in the film where she stabs to death an unsuspecting client of hers (Actually, it is never made clear if the scene takes place in Jeanne’s present or not. The man could well be her husband, whose death is talked about regularly in the film, thus, also, creating a narrative loop within the film. But considering the realities of the world, it is unlikely). This is where Akerman deviates from Tarr. Tarr seals his characters in their own existence until they fade into oblivion. His characters neither have history or hope. Akerman, on the other hand, gives her characters a past and a future. The circle in Jeanne’s life may just be a stray deadlock that had to be resolved by her action (rather, by ceasing her inaction). There is certainly a gaze at a different future throughout the film. Jeanne is expecting a gift from her aunt, which is revealed to be a dress later. She deposits money in the bank for future use. Her aunt even urges her to migrate to Canada. Even though, a large part of the movie is concerned with her empty life, it does offer a hope for renewal.
Who would have thought that one could make a sci-fi masterpiece in just 27 minutes? Well, I didn’t. I was wrong. La Jetée (1962) has left behind it, a legacy that many filmmakers have attempted to inherit, time and again, through the years. Its vision of the future of the world and its inhabitants – a sunless earth, cold expressionless faces and almost machine like emotional states – and the possibilities of experiment with cinematic and real time, that it has opened up, have become almost a standard template for sci-fi movies. If only a certain movie monument wasn’t made six years later, La Jetée, hands down, would stand out as the greatest sci-fi film ever made. The surprising fact is that the script of the film wasn’t adapted from some visionary short story, but one written loosely and directly for the screen by Chris Marker, the director, himself. And further, the script is just a minor contributor to the film’s success. Here is the thing: The word has been destroyed by the ominous nuclear war and humans are forced to stay underground. The “victors” of the war are trying to find a way to contact the past and the future of mankind to prevent the imminent annihilation of the human race. One of the lab rats for this is The Man (Davos Hanich), who retains vivid memories of his childhood and carries with himself, puzzles from the troubled past.
There is a remarkable scene in La Jetée where The Woman points at a cross-section of the tree trunk to denote her age. The Man jokingly (and self-referentially) points at a region outside the periphery of the trunk suggesting that he is from the future. This scene isn’t just an isolated homage to Vertigo (1958), but one of the many indicators that La Jetée is, in fact, laid on the very themes of Hitchcock’s film. Plainly, both films could well be seen as subjective accounts of treatments of psychological inhibitions – acrophobia and depression. In Vertigo, Scottie is a man who has lost his beloved (and whose face hypnotizes him for some reason) in an accident and is determined to reanimate her back to life, no matter what it takes. The Man, here, is no different from Scottie. The Woman could well be dead too (as he, also, suggests at one point). The Man’s tools for this “ritual” of resurrection are his memories and experiences, because of which he too, like Scottie, is nudged into the vicious cycle (rather, the Vertigo spiral) of resurrection and loss. In another extended sequence in La Jetée, The Man and The Woman visit a museum where stuffed animals are kept as exhibits. The range of animals there – giraffes, elephants and rhinos – make it seem more like a zoo than a hunter’s exhibition. The couple watches them with utmost fascination. Marker photographs the animals and the couple as if they were on the opposite sides of a mirror. There is great contradiction at work here. Are these live animals trapped in a time frame that is outside their own or are these really dead creatures resurrected back to life by some passionate enthusiast? Either way, they only reinforce that The Man and The Woman are, in fact, one of them.
But it is Marker’s use of still images for his narration, almost entirely throughout, that is the masterstroke. He could have used muted motion clips, but that would have added no vitality to the themes of the film. The Man is forced to go back to his past, even after all those traumatizing events of the world. Predictably, his memory is fragmented, much like the images of the film. He synthesizes his “past” from his subsequent experiences, passionate fantasies and remaining shards of memory. His memory seems to document, eventually, not how the events were, but how he wants to believe they were. Marker uses an array of match cuts to emphasize the dependence of The Man’s memory and vision of past on the present state of his mind and of the world. In a critical scene in the film, The Man and The Woman visit a museum where they observe stone sculptures with missing heads or other parts of their bodies. Just then, an apparently tormented face in the sculptures is juxtaposed with The Man’s own distressed countenance. Are these the just figures of ancient art or are these “products” of the mutilated bodies of the war that The Man witnesses? Most of Marker’s images are spontaneous, with each of them seeming like a freeze-frame ending for intense moments. Each of these images seems like straight out of a dark comic book, with tension and horror oozing out of each pixel. Each one carries with it a past and a future that is as troubling as The Man’s own. Interestingly there is one single shot where motion photography is employed. The Woman, after assuming various poses during sleep, opens her eyes gradually. This is, perhaps, the only time where The Man really feels alive, witnessing movement, hence freedom and hence life. The only moment of escape from his physical existence in a world trapped under the surface of the earth – a world where people don’t live, they exist, a world where they don’t die, they expire.
Right from its title, Last Year at Marienbad (1961) spells ambiguity. Neither does the film refer to a place called Marienbad, nor is it sure if the events that the protagonists, X the man (Giorgio Albertazzi) and A the lady (Delphine Sevrig), talk about took place the previous year. Last Year at Marienbad takes place in an ornate French chateau and unfolds as a conversation between X and A – a very repetitive one at that (at least, that is how it looks like!). X insists that he had met A last year when she promised that they would elope if only he waited for a year. But that’s about all the information that the film provides us. We hear X and A carrying on the same conversation, in one tone or the other, for the rest of the film. We see them moving about the chateau, gazing at the mannequin-like guests who seem to be able to speak and shut up according to the whims of X and A. Resnais superimposes every possible permutation of the characters’ forms, – past, present, memories, fantasies and possibilities – appearances – in black, in white – and locations – the chateau, the garden, the room and the bar – to produce a one-of-a-kind work that turns the very tenets of narrative cinema that is builds on.
One thing that is conclusive is that Resnais uses the chateau as a visual manifestation of the human memory. He uses parallel, rigid and clearly defined structures for the interiors of the chateau. The hedgerows in the garden are pruned to perfection and show symmetry and clarity of position and shape. Resnais’ geometry spells determination and factuality and is anything but ambiguous, like the black and white of the film. The man, who persuades the woman to walk with him through the ominous corridors and staircases of the each other’s memories, mentions at one point: “At first glance, it seemed impossible to get lost in them along the straight paths”. Unfortunately, it is only the inanimate that are static. The humans in the chateau, their relation to their surroundings, their actions, their mentality and their appearances keep changing. Like an attempt at the recollection of a distant memory, the mise-en-scene of a sequence regularly changes, filtering out the unnecessary, checking out possibilities, trying to get the perfect match of image, sound and sensation. Perhaps the term “stream of consciousness” suits Marienbad more than any other film.
The Seventh Art 