In Memoriam
Claude Lanzmann: The Other Side of Memory
Most obituaries for Claude Lanzmann focus on his masterpiece, the nine and a half hour long documentary Shoah (1985) that marks the turning point in many domains, from linguistics to ethics of memory and witnessing to. Yet, above all this, with its novel documentary film aesthetics Shoah presents a radical approach to representing the unrepresentable, i.e. showing/telling the Holocaust through thoughtful and deliberate exclusion of archival footage.
From the title Shoah – that made this Hebrew word for the Holocaust world known – Lanzmann carefully builds his cinematic narrative of the deconstruction of the European Jewry by setting original paradigms; offering a challenging new optique and urgning the audience to redefine redefine own notions of the civilizational trauma, its participants, survivors, victims and witnesses. In the very first shot of Simon Srebnik, sitting in a rowboat and singing Wenn die Soldaten on the site of Chełmno concentration camp, Lanzmann subverts principles of traditional narration in documentary films. He carefully uses only contemporary footage of first-person testimony by perpetrators and victims (consciously leaving others aside, and recognizing bystanders and helpers as perpetrators) on the former Holocaust sites – concentration camps, railroad trucks, ghettos. “What can neither be recounted by the voice nor shown by the images is figured instead in their non relation.” (Saxton 2008: 32); in their riveting discrepancy of voice, figure and landscape. The landscape gives visible testimony to what cannot be represented in the voice. “In turn, voice excavates a past entombed in the landscape and hidden from the sight.” (Ibid.) It is buried under layers of earth, forests and grass on lieux d`histoire that have become lieux de mémoire through decades of the Holocaust being pushed into the oblivion and by the disappearance of survivors. In other, memorable, emblematic scenes, the director uses the interview (ethically problematic and mercilessly, put into practice) not only to restage (Henryk Gawkowski) the past, but to make deeply traumatised survivors (Abraham Bomba, a barber from Auschwitz who collapses in front of camera, and pleads the director to stop the interview) relive the tormenting pain of the past and re-enact the tragic event.
Since its premiere – especially the one in Israel attended by the survivors and their families – the film has been the subject of polemics revolving around the topics such as: the critique of the use of (impossible) archival images and reconstructions that trivialise the Shoah; uncertainties about the very possibility of representation of the unique break down in the history of civilisation; about the hypothetical film about the unrepresentable core of the Holocaust (film “from the gas chamber”). Further contribution to these polemics came from theoretical disputes with Godard (Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1988), Didi Huberman (Images malgré tout, 1992), Rivette (De l’abjection, 1961) and Daney (Le travelling de Kapo, 1992), and the philosophical rethinking of Adorno, Rancière, Levinas, Agamben, Bernard-Henri Lévy. One of Lanzmann`s main arguments is that his aim has never been to explain what Shoah was. Rather, his cinema is dedicated to simple showing and telling what but not why it happened.
Although Claude Lanzmann made a dozen of films, wrote several books, hundreds of articles, and gave a number of interviews Shoah indisputably stays his key, most popular and acclaimed work, however haunted by controversies. His other films ramify (Le dernier des injustes, 2013) and explore further (Four Sisters, 2018) the topic, often using excerpts from 350 hour-long footage made for Shoah during the 12 years of the work on the project. Likewise, comparison of the thematic twin films – Sobibor (Konstantin Khabenskiy, 2018) and Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4. p.m. (Claude Lanzmann, 2001) strongly argues for the righteousness of the unique documentary approach. Against diluted, pale and unconvincingly spectacular narration of the feature fiction film stands the documentary made almost as a single interview.
Temperamental, capricious, attentive to himself and his wishes, Lanzmann lived his life, occasionally without sufficient concern for people around him. Testifying to this is his memoir The Patagonian Hare (Le lièvre de Patagonie, 2009) that in style of writing complements his cinematic mise-en-scène that persuasively reveals his complex personality. In this exciting and fascinating book, the author narrates his own life and work while at the same time offering a vivid chronicle of the cultural, intellectual and art scenes of Paris, Europe and the world. An important and in many ways central place belongs to the (hi)story of the intellectual left and the impressive, dominant figures of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir with whom the author had intricate love-and-hate paternal, intellectual and romantic relations. The life of “the family” – as they often referred to their small circle – was changeable and dynamic, marked with both mythical and tragic tones. As in Greek tragedies, the latter is visible in the inevitable, symbolic patricide when Lanzmann, finally, with the passion and zeal of a true Zionist, stood up against Sartre’s pro-Palestinian and antiIsrael stands. The mythical shade is my personal impression got during the reading of the book, when facts and truths of history become upstaged and overshadowed by a life story with a mythical aura. The title Patagonian Hare, misleadingly referencing South America, really evokes “a breed of hare, dozens of which bounded in front of his headlights as he drove through a dark forest in northern Yugoslavia during a trip there in the early 1950s” (Rieff 2012). Furthermore, it alludes to the elusiveness of memories as flashing images that become blurred and disappear quickly. We all try to capture them, but only few – like Lanzmann – manage to catch them and, also, to weave them into the stories of the past. Due to his skill of memory hunter/maker/marker the (hi)stories of true events are given with the freedom of the fiction told from one’s subjective, immersed and personal perspective.
The official biographies only briefly mention Monny (de) Boully, Lanzmann’s stepfather and the only true love of his mother Paulette Groberman. In diverse, personal writings, portrayal of Monny runs like an emotional, warm and affectionate fil rouge, while Lanzmann claims that Belgrade`s Sephardi and a surrealist dissident was more of a real father to him than his biological father and that he learned a lot about women, life and cinema from him. From their first encounter – in 1942, in the middle of a winter night filled with the fear that at any moment Gestapo might knock on the door of their family house – Lanzmann sees a charming, warm, poetical and mysterious figure. Monny appears as the unknown tall man in his forties, with high forehead, his eyes radiating kindness and intelligence, and fear written all over his face. He knows that the boy in front of him is Claude and presents himself in whisper as Mr. Sylvester (comp. Lanzmann 2009: 77). The two of them would meet again only after the war when Claude, Jacques and Evelyn – Paulette`s children – came to Paris to the small apartment in Alexander Cabanel street to live with their mother and stepfather. Monny greeted them, and unconditionally accepted and loved them as if they were his own. (comp. Lanzmann 2009: 130).
At his young age, as a student of the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, Lanzmann was introduced to the literary circles during the many soirees organised by Paulette and Monny.
Lanzmann`s tale of Monny gives me the ground to speculate – and it is the moment of departure from the traditional obituaries mentioned at the beginning – about possible latent influence and connections between their cinematic works. In 1923 in Belgrade, 19 years old Monny wrote Dr. Hypnison or the Technique of Living (Dr Hipnison ili tehnika života) – an avant-garde film written as a film script and never meant to be made as a real film. It was to be seen on our mind screen and as such it is similar to (proto)surrealism and Benjamin Fondane`s notion of unfilmable film (1928). Read retroactively, after the devastating and horrifying experience of the WW2 and the Holocaust, the subtitle of the film, technique of life, acquires both clairvoyant and ironic quality. The same experience – the encounter with the Holocaust – that Lanzmann made into films, might be seen as dealing with the technique of death – death being his personal obsession on many levels.
Finally, for Claude, his mother and stepfather stayed the epitome of endless, absolute love; the kind that lasts for eternity (comp. Lanzmann 2014) as it is suggested in the poem inscribed on the grave where all three of them are buried.
Passé, présent, avenir, où êtes-vous passés
Ici n’est nulle part
Là-haut jeter le harpon
Là-haut parmi les astres monotones
When you visit the tomb in the old Jewish part (V division) of Cimetiere Montparnasse you pay homage both to Claude Lanzmann and Monny de Boully and their uncanny, entangled lives, films and poems. After his brief affair with cinema, Monny devoted his life to poetry, while Lanzmann remained “a filmmaker who made a novel out of his life” (Savigneau 2018). Writing by pen or by caméra stylo were equally important to him, but the film is the one he will always be remembered for. His Shoah bears witness to a missing testimony; it achieved “the status of an original event” (cit. after Traverso 2018). It has become more than a film – Shoah itself.
References
De Beauvoir, S. 1995. “Introduction” in Lanzmann, C. Shoah: The Complete Text Of The Acclaimed Holocaust Film, New York: Da Capo Press.
Lanzmann, C. 2009. Le Lièvre de Patagonie. Paris: Gallimard.
Lanzmann, C. 2014. “À toi, Paulette, à toi seule, éternellement”, Available at: https://laregledujeu.org/2014/12/03/18533/a-toi-paulette-a-toi-seule-eternellement/ [Accessed on March 15th 2018].
Rieff, D. 2012. “A Vast Choir of Voices: On Claude Lanzmann”, The Nation. Available at: https://www.thenation.com/article/vast-choir-voices-claude-lanzmann/ [Accessed on: March 15th 2018].
Savignea, J. 2018. “Claude Lanzmann, un cinéaste qui a fait de sa vie un roman”, Le Monde. Available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2018/07/05/claude-lanzmann-un-cineaste-qui-a-fait-de-sa-vie-un-roman_5326322_3382.html [Accessed on August 8th 2018].
Saxton, L. 2008. Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London & New York: Wallflower Press.
Traverso, E. 2018. “Claude Lanzmann: A Critical Appraisal”, Jacobin. Available at: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/claude-lanzmann-shoah-holocaust-antisemitism/ [Accessed on August 8th 2018].
Nevena Daković, Ph.D. is a full-time professor of Film Theory/Film Studies (Dept. of Theory and History, FDA, University of Arts, Belgrade) and the Chair of Interdisciplinary Doctoral Art and Media Studies programme (UoA). She is the author (Studije filma: ogledi o filmskim tekstovima sećanja , 2014; Balkan kao filmski žanr: slika, tekst, nacija, 2008) and editor ( Graničnici sećanja: jevrejsko nasleđe i Holokaust, 2018; Media Archaeology, 2016; Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media,, 2015) of more than ten books. Nevena Daković publishes widely in national and international journals (UK, Turkey, Slovakia, Italy, Austria, France, USA). She participates in conferences and is a committee member of international project groups (COST and TEMPUS projects). She is guest lecturer at European and American universities and is a member of Academia Europaea. Her main research topics include: nation, representation, the Balkans, Shoah, and cultural memory.
