Directed by Claude Lanzmann.
SYNOPSIS:
A nine hour 36 minute long documentary about the Holocaust.
Shoah is almost as hard to write about as it is to watch. It isn’t the subject matter that gets to you. We’re all exposed far too much to the Holocaust and World War II through television, literature and film for it to have a truly visceral effect anymore. As discouraging as it is, the years truly have anaesthetised the heart. Instead, it is the length that one feels, its incomprehensibleness – nine hours and thirty-six minutes. The longest film you’ve ever seen is but a pebble in a grand lake in comparison.
That’s the intention - it’s incomprehensibility. To picture a thousand people is near impossible. The mind wretches at the image of six million; all of those Jewish, all of those dead.
The film’s form, of its immense length, is entwined with its overarching statement: the Holocaust was an evil apart from all others. Claude Lanzmann takes offence at the very name, entitling the mass extermination ‘Shoah’. The word ‘Holocaust’ has connotations of sacrifice, whereas the ‘Shoah’ is Hebrew for ‘calamity’.
It is an experience, an endurance test, rather than a film. It is segmented into four, two hour long chapters, each concerned with a different topic. Although this hints that a slight concession has been made in creating these four ‘parts’, making the film easier to watch and digest, the themes and players that leak into their surrounding parts keep its entire form still very much whole.
There is a part on Chelmo, where gas vans were first used to exterminate Jews. It then moves onto the more advanced, industrial methods of slaughter at the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Finally, the film concerns itself with the Warsaw Ghetto.
The relentless search for efficiency, a desire that scaled up those initial processes into death camps, is manifested in an evaluation form of the gas vans, read by Lanzmann at the end of the film’s first half. His monotonous voice, in French, repeats the following over footage being filmed from a car window, driving through the industrial district of Ruhr. Those murderous gas vans wouldn’t have had windows, you think morbidly to yourself.
Berlin, June 5 1942The language of bureaucracy veils the request’s true intention, the devil lurking in the details. Faeces, piss and vomit become “fluid liquids” and “large pieces of dirt”. Lanzmann’s monotone echoes the efficiency of the language. On listening to the requests, it’s impossible to avoid outrage. Lanzmann recognises this, and to express his own would be to over sentimentalise its impact. Instead he allows the camera to drift onto the truck next to his, specifically the mudguard on its back wheel. It reads SAURER in white, bolded letters.
Changes for special vehicles now in service at Kulmhof (Chelmno) and for those now being built.
Since December 1941, ninety-seven thousand have been processed ("verarbeit" in German) by the three vehicles in service, with no major incidents. In the light of observations made so far, however, the following technical changes are needed:
1. The vans' normal load is usually nine per square yard. In Saurer vehicles, which are very spacious, maximum use of space is impossible, not because of any possible overload, but because loading to full capacity would affect the vehicle's stability. So reduction of the load space seems necessary. It must absolutely be reduced by a yard, instead of trying to solve the problem, as hitherto, by reducing the number of pieces loaded. Besides, this extends the operating time, as the empty void must be filled with carbon monoxide. On the other hand, if the load space is reduced, and the vehicle is packed solid, the operating time can be considerably shortened. The manufacturers told us during a discussion that reducing the size of the van's rear would throw it badly off balance. The front axle, they claim, would be overloaded. In fact, the balance is automatically restored, because the merchandise aboard displays during the operation a natural tendency to rush to the rear doors, and is mainly found lying there at the end of the operation. So the front axle is not overloaded.
2. The lighting must be better protected than now. The lamps must be enclosed in a steel grid to prevent their being damaged. Lights could be eliminated, since they apparently are never used. However, it has been observed that when the doors are shut, the load always presses hard against them [the doors] as soon as darkness sets in. This is because the load naturally rushes toward the light when darkness sets in, which makes closing the doors difficult. Also, because of the alarming nature of darkness, screaming always occurs when the doors are closed. It would therefore be useful to light the lamp before and during the first moments of the operation.
3. For easy cleaning of the vehicle, there must be a sealed drain in the middle of the floor. The drainage hole's cover, eight to twelve inches in diameter, would be equipped with a slanting trap, so that fluid liquids can drain off during the operation. During cleaning, the drain can be used to evacuate large pieces of dirt.
The aforementioned technical changes are to be made to vehicles in service only when they come in for repairs. As for the ten vehicles ordered from Saurer, they must be equipped with all innovations and changes shown by use and experience to be necessary.
Submitted for decision to Gruppenleiter II D, SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Walter Rauff.
Signed Just.
Lanzmann shares an obsession with such details. When questioning/interrogating survivors, murderers and bystanders throughout the film, he avoids those lofty questions of horror – variations on ‘how could anyone commit such atrocities?’ – and instead focuses on facts. It is a sentiment shared by the historian Raul Hilberg, whom Lanzmann interviews in the film. “In all of my work I have never begun by asking the big questions because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers, and I have preferred, therefore, to address these things which are minutiae or detail…” Although Hilberg talks both quietly and eloquently, the manner in which he draws out the vowels of certain words, or cuts short mid-sentence, gives the impression its all through intensely gritted teeth.
In one scene, Lanzmann interviews Abraham Bomba, a barber in Tel Aviv. Bomba had been spared from the gas chambers so he could cut the women’s hair before they went in. Lanzmann questions him, often harshly, about his experiences whilst Bomba snips away at a customer’s head. The choice of scenery is a smart one; the familiarity presumably giving Bomba some small comfort, while also recalling the conditions of his story.
Lanzmann asks about what Bomba had cut with, whether there were any mirrors, how many barbers were there. They are unemotional questions, seeking for similarly dispassionate responses, yet they are charged with poignancy. The camera becomes uncomfortably tight on Bomba’s face when he can no longer continue to cut the man’s hair. He starts to weep and begs not to go on with the questioning. “You have to do it. I know it’s very hard. I know and I apologise,” Lanzmann forcibly replies.
These are old men and women whom Lanzmann has tracked down and interviewed – people who were there when it happened, people who won’t be around for much longer. During Shoah’s filming, the Holocaust was passing out of living memory. Lanzmann’s determination to preserve it, a resolve fuelled by his aversion to documentary footage, is propelled by this unfortunate fact. The human experience is far more important than any strip of celluloid.
Lanzmann’s argument is that by portraying the Holocaust through archive film and images, it is in some way simplified and made more attainable. Certainly, the scenes the various interviewees paint through their stories are far more vivid and affecting than the black and white photos of corpse piled upon corpse. After a while, the film places in you a distrust of both mediums, restoring the essence of truth back to human testimony. Because, for Lanzmann, the Holocaust was genocide beyond most evils, and it is of the upmost importance not to trivialise this.
It is a debatable principle, but a noble one in the context of this extraordinary and affective documentary.
RATING ****
Oli Davis
365 Days, 100 Films
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