Shoah: Year Zero

By any reasonable measure, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) should've been the Year Zero of Holocaust documentaries. Not in the sense that it should've supplanted Night and Fog or made what came before irrelevant, but simply that it should've made some things clearer for those to follow. Like: don't use archival footage of the concentration camps. What little there is has been used and reused so extensively that it's been drained of any power, and to pretend otherwise is self-congratulation on the part of the viewer. And: the inherent gravity of your subject matter does not mean form gets to take a walk in the park. It's the opposite: great tragedy demands great artfulness if it's not to be trivialized. There is nothing respectful about being "hands-off" or "letting the material speak for itself"; it could just be coasting on good intentions.

In the 24 years since Shoah was first released, no one seems to have learned anything from it. Remember the ghastly post-Schindler's List period when any documentary about the Holocaust would automatically win Best Documentary at the Oscars, just on subject matter alone? (Better yet, remember the winners? The Long Way Home? Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport?) Lanzmann's film, on the contrary, brings the rigor formally. And, at nine-and-a-half hours, it understandably doesn't get shown very often. MoMA screened it earlier this summer and will show it again Saturday Sunday; I went and was shocked that this major landmark in documentaries had all of about 30 people attending. Granted, nine-and-a-half hours in one sitting is pretty unholy; during its original run, its two parts were shown on consecutive days. But it's only a couple hours longer than Sátántangó, and New Yorkers rocked every screening of that at MoMA a few years back. I'll confess to having real trouble getting through the last two hours (though a one-day marathon is Fred Camper's preferred way of seeing the film). But it's worth it—this Saturday's screening deserves something closer to a full crowd.

What watching Shoah is like, generically, varies over its duration. In one way, it's a doubly-distilled time capsule: the footage dates from the '70s (not surprisingly, whittling down 350 hours of footage took four-and-a-half years), while the editing sprawled through the '80s. So Shoah is not without its period pleasures, although that's obviously a bad reason for watching it. At its best, what Shoah oddly resembles most is one of those globetrotting '70s spy thrillers, with Lanzmann as our man of adventure. This isn't as outlandish as it sounds. Interwoven throughout the film are interviews with former Nazi commandants, obtained furtively, and frankly, illegally. Inside each house, a tiny concealed camera transmits grainy black-and-white interview footage to a van with a rotating satellite dish parked outside, with the techs inside tweaking the transmission as it comes in. Over time, as the van pulls up outside one house after another, we recognize what's coming next; when such a shot opens the second half, it's like we're getting back into a groove with our favorite investigative team.

Sometimes, Shoah is a indictment of staggered, contemptuous disdain, an angrily sarcastic film-essay—like the last reel of the first half, when Lanzmann reads out detailed, proposed modifications for trucks that'll kill Jews more efficiently through the exhaust during the slow drive towards the forest. "The load naturally rushes towards the light when darkness sets in," Lanzmann reads as his camera ever so slowly zooms onto the logo of a contemporary Saurer truck on the road—the same kind of truck being contracted for in the letter. Sometimes Lanzmann stages staggering set-pieces that play out for longer than you could think possible: in the best 40 minutes, he brings one Simon Srebnik back to the Polish village he was a prisoner in, filming him in front of a crowd of villagers who remember him. As the loyal Catholics indict themselves—including the man who declares the Holocaust happened as retribution for the death of Christ—their clump in front of the local church threatens to disrupt a march in honor of the Village Mary, something Lanzmann takes barely suppressed glee in. This section is one long, semi-comic outrage, and it's the film's argumentative peak. Chain-smoking, and in a hurry to pry away every last detail, Lanzmann's openly amused when Polish villagers assert that they speak "Jewish," but he doesn't have time or interest in getting sidetracked and rebuking anyone to their face: he lets them dig their own graves and keeps moving.

Mostly, though, Shoah is an exacting, protoypical art film, one which derives its power from the duration of its shots and the film's willingness to linger among its many locales far past the point of narrative expedience—taking in forests and villages, forcing you to soak in the atmosphere. Much has been made of how the film, by lack archival footage or much visible evidence of what's being discussed, forces viewers to perform mental reconstruction in their head; there's certainly truth to this. But beyond the tension between past and present—the evidence that's been erased and the psychic scars that can't be—Shoah is a film that's minute-to-minute, forcing you to sit and take it in even when you'd rather not. As Camper wrote, "as the film progresses, its length gains another significance: the viewer begins to feel the way in which the film is taking a large chunk of time out of his day, out of his life. [...] We attend to it differently; it intrudes more directly into our thoughts and lives, an intrusion thoroughly appropriate to Shoah's subject."

Unless you're a Holocaust scholar, chances are you'll learn more about the details and mechanics of the Final Solution than you might've expected, which has its own sick fascination, but it goes beyond information: it's a genuine aesthetic experience in a documentary genre that's generally anti-aesthetic. It's the real thing, although MoMA's making a real mistake in showing it as a one-day marathon. I understand the thinking (MoMA's a museum, not a "theater"), but it takes a difficult movie and turns the act of watching it into a macho feat of filmgoing. The merciless last two hours—at which point the film is basically unbroken interviews, getting down to the most brutal and devastating testimony—were really hard for me. After Sátántangó, I know I'm prone to check out after the seven-and-a-half-hour mark, so just as Lanzmann was paring down his aesthetic to a bare minimum, I couldn't stop checking my watch. Still, regardless of circumstance: see it. A month later, I still don't regret giving up that Sunday.

Posted by ahillis at August 27, 2009 6:16 PM