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He died on July 5, he was 92 years old. He was, everyone knows, writer, director, polemicist, but also and first … an artist, a fighter, an ogre. There was something colossal about Lanzmann, the stature, the gestures, the voice and the verb. He played, abused, amused himself.
There was something greedy, predatory too – and to women, it was not always permissible. There was childhood, many, always, along with a gigantic culture, immensely diverse and curious about the world
A physical courage that sometimes confined to unconsciousness. A sense of expense. This vitality, this complicated and paradoxical wealth should dissuade anyone from trying to put it in any simplifying box.
Claude Lanzmann did a thousand things in his life – he told many of them in a book which is also a very large literary text, The Patagonian Hare, published by Gallimard in 2009.
He gave otherwise the echoes, then gathering fifty texts published by him throughout his life as a journalist, pamphleteer or memorialist of his time ( The Tomb of the Divine Diver Gallimard, 2012)
Claude Lanzmann , Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in Egypt in 1967 | AFP
He not only directed but also deeply imbued with his presence one of the great intellectual journals in French, Modern Times where he had succeeded the founders, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
He traveled, debated, defended, attacked, narrated; he wrote, talked, filmed – a lot, and with a stunning virtuosity.
And then Claude Lanzmann did Shoah . And that's something else, of a different nature. For twelve years, from 1973 to 1985, he scoured the world in search of survivors of the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis, and filmed them. He also filmed some of the executioners and some witnesses, and worked on the editing of these plans.
Shoah a film without equal
The badembly of some of these elements gives birth in 1985 to a nine o'clock film. A film with no equivalent in the history of cinema
Shoah changed the understanding of the event itself. It is mainly after him that we now call this event the Holocaust. He made a powerful contribution to the understanding of what happened in Europe between 1942 and 1945, and he very much helped to make sure that we never stop dealing with it, as an event both in the course of history and overflowing. He did it with the means of a filmmaker and proved that, without minimizing those of historians, they were not less important.
"Shoah": Henrik Gawkowski, the driver of the locomotive to the extermination camp
And Shoah changed the thinking of the cinema. As an artist of first magnitude, that is to say as a designer of forms that think and help to think, Lanzmann has conceived a rigorous, radical work.
This work is built on great principles, the best known of which is the absence of archive images and the decisive bet on the real presence of those who speak. But the unique power of Shoah is played out in each choice of framing, editing, relationship between words, bodies and places.
Shapes that think
He found himself poor minds to write – almost in the columns of Modern Times alas Shoah is a film without images. Whereas Shoah, are nine hours of images, in all their power.
This power is increased tenfold by putting in crisis of belief in the visible, appearances, by that they join, at the same time as the unanswered question of extermination, the deepest meaning of what "cinema" means.
And since, Shoah haunts the great works of cinema, fiction as documentary , on all subjects, at the same time that he opened the door in many ways to face other tragedies by the film.
Very quickly, when we talk about Claude Lanzmann, we talk about his character of Pig, we daube on his virulence and his egocentrism, we mock his propensity to consider the Holocaust as his preserve. As for the last point, it is stupid and false.
Lanzmann accompanied and supported other films, including very different from what he had done-for example The Son of Saul of the young Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, as he had recognized, even in criticizing certain aspects, the value of the immense literary work of Jonathan Littell's Kindly
The demand, the anger and generosity
As for his attacks on other films, starting with Life is Beautiful Benigni and Schindler's List Spielberg, they result from a Acute awareness of the ethical issues badociated with the ways of showing and telling – games extremely exacerbated when it comes to the planned mbadacre of six million human beings, but always present issues, always active in any gesture of representation, of implementation scene
That the author of Shoah felt responsible, in the sense of having to take his responsibilities, in the face of what he considered unethical methods of making spectacle from the extermination is both very understandable and to his credit.
Virulent, excessive? But without doubt it was necessary this conquering energy, intractable of the old maquisard of the mountains of Auvergne to carry out the colossal enterprise, and at the time very solitary and devoid of financial support, that had been the realization of Shoah .
And more than that, it took this fight every day to impose the film, to constantly reimpose it, so that a work of this extraordinary level indeed plays the role that was
Since 1985, Lanzmann has been the fighter of his own film. It can be covered with all the ironic epithets that you want, that's how it has made an essential reference for the consciousness of human beings.
The poster of a series of projections of "Shoah" in China in 2004, presented by Claude Lanzmann
And far from wanting to preserve a purity of demiurge owner, he will have been the first to seek all the possibilities of meetings with all the public, especially with the youngest, working tirelessly with educational leaders – two fine books, Educating against Auschwitz by Jean-François Forges and Shoah a pedagogy of memory by Carles Torner (19659003) One must have seen that, tireless propagator of his work, including in countries where the subject is exotic, to make Chinese audiences understand, for example, how Shoah also concerns them. How much!
Shoah makes cinema and history, by its capacity to arouse what can arise from the meeting of a voice and a place, the presence of a face inhabited by a memory-what Claude Lanzmann names, in the last lines of Hare " the incarnation ".
But at the moment when he realized this film-monument, he was already a filmmaker, as evidenced by his first film, Why Israel released in 1973.
An open eye, a closed eye
When he realizes it, Claude Lanzmann, who was militant anticolonialist , a signatory of the Manifesto of the 121 in favor of Algerian independence, the friend of great revolutionary figures and especially the privileged interlocutor of Frantz Fanon (1) became a firm support of Israel and Zionism . And the film leaves no doubt on this point.
It nonetheless constitutes a testimony of an impressive richness, which is due to the exceptional artistic sensitivity of its author rather than his commitment.
An image of "Tsahal" (1994)
And even when Claude Lanzmann turned in 1994, still explicitly partisan, IDF devoted to the Israeli military, the film – as partial as it is – is of such an intelligence of the situations, of such a capacity to make perceptible the springs of the human beings and the systems that it accomplishes a memorable cinematographic work.
point that if, understandably, the defenders of the Palestinian people attack this film, it is more advisable to advise them to watch it carefully: they have more to learn about their enemy than in the vast majority of production favor
When making a film, Lanzmann was too good a filmmaker to be locked in the shackles of propaganda. It was not the same when he spoke or wrote. As the years pbad, he will thus become more and more intractable, not to say more and more blind to the reality of Israel, refusing to admit the existence of crimes committed by the army and settlers. [19659003] And yet, at the same time, he will have also composed exciting, complex, deep and moving films, from recordings made for Shoah and which had not found a place there.
the last of them, The Four Sisters was released on July 4, the day before his death. He succeeds to A pbading living (1997) Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 pm (2001) The report Karski (2010) and The Last of the Unjust (2013).
Each of his films, far from being content to accommodate the "remains" of Shoah has its own logic, its own stakes, its own thought of cinema. The filmmaker's eye will always remain wide open, the eye of the citizen and the pamphleteer will have ostensibly closed.
The strangest of films
Gourmand, enjoyer, athlete, seducer, the man Claude Lanzmann does not does not summarize these two major dimensions that are his cinema facing the abyss of the Shoah and his relationship to Israel.
Among the countless amazing encounters that dotted the course of this man himself amazing, there had been for example this insane idyll with a nurse from Pyongyang, during a trip to North Korea in 1958, which was also attended by Chris Marker and Armand Gatti.
Long time, Lanzmann dreamed of making it a fiction film, for which he had wrote a scenario that he never could have produced. Instead of which was born the most bizarre of the films, Napalm (2017).
Framed in close-up during the greatest part film, Claude Lanzmann applied to himself and his intimate feelings the powers of incarnation whose resources he had explored in his previous achievements in a collective tragedy. And his own story of an improbable romance that had occurred sixty years before opened up on chasms, very current, eternal.
1 – Before returning in The Patagonian Hare Lanzmann gave a very impressive account of his encounter with Fanon in Modern Times n ° 635-636 under the title: "El Menzah 1960, a prophetic and testamentary voice". Return to Article
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