Why we need to (re)see Shoah, the masterpiece of Claude Lanzmann

This evening, from 9:10 p.m., France 2 broadcasts the documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann in full. Return to an essential film.

It took eleven years to complete Holocaustundertaken by Claude Lanzmann in the summer of 1973. The film totaled 570 minutes and was released in France on April 30, 1985. This sum immediately established itself as a cinematographic reference. By its subject – the extermination of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis during the Second World War -, and the choice of its treatment – a succession of testimonies in the present -, Holocaust has value as a reference for historians and a compass for collective memory. Simone de Beauvoir wrote upon her release: “It is not easy to talk about the Shoah. There’s magic in this movie, and magic can’t be explained.”or even “cLike all spectators, I mix the past and the present (…) it is in this confusion that the miraculous side of Shoah resides.“

Claude Lanzmann born in 1925 and died in 2018, was first a hero of the French Resistance before becoming, after the war, an intellectual figure alongside the Sartre-de Beauvoir couple. He joins the magazine Modern times of which he would later become the director. In 1972, he created, completely self-taught Why Israelportrait of a country and its twenty-five years of history, before tackling what would become his great work.

Manuel Alduy: “Shoah is a painful experience, but one that must be lived”

“There is no film about the Holocaust…“

Holocaust is a more or less formal order made to Claude Lanzmann by the director of the department at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In his autobiography, The Patagonian harethe filmmaker remembers the words of this official at the release of Why Israel : “There is no film about the Shoah, not a film which embraces this event in its totality and its magnitude, not a film which shows it from our point of view, from the point of view of the Jews…“Whose act.

By his own admission, Lanzmann then had very brief knowledge of this tragedy responsible for the death of nearly six million people between 1939 and 1945. Helped in particular by the work of the historian Raul Hilberg, the filmmaker plunges into the twists and turns nightmares of Nazi barbarism. Two lines of force will dictate his work. The first takes the place of an almost mystical revelation. Holocaust would not speak of “survival” but of “death”, the living would fade behind the mute victims, the “we” would replace the “I”.

No stock images

“My film should meet the ultimate challenge: replacing the non-existent images of death in the gas chambers. Everything had to be built…“, writes the filmmaker, still in his autobiography. And this “construction” will not involve a reconstruction. It is to the very places of barbarism (mainly in Poland) that Claude Lanzmann goes. If nature has partly covered with the stigmata of horror, the strength of the testimonies allows the wounds to reveal their open spaces. This is the “magic” that Simone de Beauvoir spoke of.

The second intuition is deduced from the first. In Holocaust, the past is combined with the present. The filmmaker immediately bans archive images which, according to him, falsify reality more than they reveal it. Lanzmann “manufactures” his images himself and is thus the guarantor of their full authenticity.

A moral choice more than aesthetic which will make the filmmaker the slayer of all fictional or documentary representations of Holocaust. Steven Spielberg and his Schindler’s List will pay the price when it is released in 1994. Claude Lanzmann writes:

“Fiction is a transgression, I deeply think that there is a prohibition on representation. Seeing Schindler’s ListI rediscovered what I had felt when seeing the soap opera Holocaust. Transgress or trivialize, here it’s the same: the soap opera or the Hollywood film ‘transgress’ because they ‘trivialize’, thus abolishing the unique character of the Holocaust.”

“Claude made you a witness…”

Holocaust a multiplication of testimonies from victims (mostly based in Israel), witnesses but also executioners is being built. The film is divided into two parts: the first and the second period, for a duration of around 10 hours. The film won an honorary César in 1986.

At the funeral of Claude Lanzmann, in July 2018, this is what Arnaud Desplechin, one of the most fervent admirers of his work, wrote:

“… Claude made me, each of you, a witness (…) It took Shoah and its formidable power of incarnation for me to understand the world I inherited, the world in which I live, of the art that I aspire to. It was Lanzmann who put things right for me.“

Holocaust by Claude Lanzmann, is broadcast in full on France 2, from 9:10 p.m. on Tuesday January 30, 2024. Then available in replay for one month on the France Télévisions website