Film For the past few months I've been keeping a filmlog, short reviews of most of the things I've been watching, including a review as long as the del.icio.us note box will allow. It's quite a test reducing everything you think about a film to two lines and I think I fail more times than I succeed and sometimes it's basically impossible.
Claude Lanzmann's Shoah is a nine-hour film about the Holocaust which instead of following the usual pattern of including archive footage of the concentration camps and ghettos, instead relies on the testimonies of survivors, bystanders and even perpetrators.
It's simply harrowing as men and women force themselves to remember events and feelings that they've buried for forty years and you can often see a fear in their eyes as it becomes apparent that in some ways the Nazis succeeded in creating the legacy they strove for at least in the minds of these people.
At no point does anyone seem exploited; although Lanzmann sometimes nudges them to continue talking (painfully in some cases) they all have an understanding that they're putting their experiences on record. But he doesn't stop if he thinks an interviewee who had the capacity to do something about it, or even perpetrated the crime is being evasive with their answers.
I'll admit to not watching the whole film in one sitting. My rental service treated the work as a television series and sent it a disc at a time, so it was section of two hours or so. Even then it was a difficult ask and at times I would guiltily set the disc aside until I felt like I could just ...
Which explains the power of the film -- considering it mostly consists of talking heads and verite footage of survivors returning to the scenes of their nightmares. I have a vivid imagination and just with their subtitled words I conjured up all kinds of images, some of which I'll never forget.
Now and then, the grainy 16mm footage fills in the gaps with shots of the mountains of possessions collected by the aggressors before the Jewish people entered the concentration camps or of the train that carried them to their certain death. Often shots would be repeated to remind the viewer that this wasn't simply a single act of murder. The Nazis systematically went about their business, day in and out, week in and out, over and over.
I was originally going to say on my filmlog that everyone should be able to find nine hours in their life to sit through this. But it's really the kind of work that can profoundly effect the way you think about the world and what a certain version of humanity is capable of and if you're not prepared for it you'll have to be a very happy person to bounce back easily.
What I will say is that at the age of thirty-two, having seen Schindler's List, Conspiracy and countless other dramas and documentaries about the holocaust I've only now gone some way to really understand what happened and for the first time in ages wanted to pray that something like this never happens again. Even though I know that such evils have happened day in and out, week in and out, over and over since then and continue to happen today.
Anyway, back to the filmlog. Next, Congo (1995) ...
1 comment:
I had the same reaction when I watched "Anne Frank Remembered" last year. The end of the film was so difficult to watch I had to stop the DVD a couple of times. It's so hard to wrap my mind around the extent of the Holocaust. Somehow it's more comprehensible to think about it at the individual level than to try to think about the millions who died, which is why interviews like those are so important.
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