Claude Lanzmann, the Shoah facing camera

It was last summer, in Jerusalem, at the International Film Festival. Claude Lanzmann, 92, monument of French cinema, was invited to present his latest film, Napalm : "A personal story, unique, that never left me", explained to the public come to see the director of Shoah. Among the hundred lives of the gargantuan Lanzmann, Napalm is in fact to be stored in love memories. The writer had told him in his autobiography, the Patagonian Hare (Gallimard, 2009): in 1958, he who roamed the planet since the end of the Second World War had managed to slip into Korea of the North, under the dictator Kim Il-sung. There he had fallen ill and … in love with his nurse. Claude Lanzmann was never able to forget his adventure with the Korean girl with napalm burned chest during the Korean War. More than 90 years old, he returned to North Korea in search of this lost love in Kim Jong-un's country. But the great story of his life is Shoah – meticulous, reconstructed global account of the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices . A nine-and-a-half hour film that struck the world in 1985: "It's not a movie of memories (memories are a thing of the past) but par excellence a film of memory in the present, he wrote in Liberation in 2011 to attack historians who criticized him. Thanks to Shoah, the historical knowledge changes nature, one attends, for nine hours thirty, to an incarnation of the truth, the opposite of the faculty of sanitization of the science, even of the historical science. " In Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 pm, a film about the revolt of the extermination camp, he will then show the heroism of the Jews who, knowing their near death, had chose to fight. Later, in 2010, he will resume the Karski Report, the interview of Polish resistance leader Jan Karski, sent to Washington to explain to President Roosevelt that the Jews were not going to survive in Hitler's Europe. A unique document that will reveal the indifference of President Roosevelt to the fate of the Jews and the responsibility of the Allies in the Final Solution.

To read also Claude Lanzmann, the twentieth century incarnated – Liberation

"Mission" [19659004] In 2013, Lanzmann will face the painful question of the alleged participation of the Jews in their own death in The Last of the Unjust, Portrait of Benjamin Murmelstein, a former leader of the Jewish Councils (Judenrats) accused of "collaboration". We see Lanzmann, 87, return to the scene of the mbadacres, reliving the drama of these Jewish leaders trying to save what could be. He then confided "to be Murmelstein", during the shooting in the Theresienstadt camp: "This man felt invested with a mission, he saved thousands of Jews. He was an adventurer. " This cycle begun with Shoah will end in 2018 with a new film, The Four Sisters, broadcast in January on Arte and in theaters since Wednesday, dedicated to four survivors of the death camps.

Claude Lanzmann came alone to Jerusalem in this summer of 2017 to show Napalm to the public. And swim as usual in the pool of Mount Zion Hotel. But in the night, he will fall in his room, and it will be necessary to call urgently doctors who will advise him to return to seek treatment in Paris. "No way!" had he roared. I want to watch all the screenings of my film. And I want to go to Tel Aviv to see my nephew, the son of my brother Jacques. I rented a car. " We did not negotiate with Lanzmann. He will stay until the end of the festival, we will just prevent him from taking the wheel. At 90, the man did not give up driving. He had lost the last points of his license to have crossed a line in front of the National Assembly? Never mind, he will iron his license sixteen times and eventually recover it. This will allow him to buy a big Audi to go find one of his friends in Switzerland.

"I am neither jaded nor tired of the world, a hundred lives, I know, would not tire," said Claude Lanzmann. Tireless, uncontrollable, unbearable, inexhaustible, insatiable, excessive, all extreme adjectives can be used to describe the character. The first of his hundred lives begin during the Second World War. At 18 years old, a communist at Clermont-Ferrand High School, he carried weapons with a young friend and fought in the scrubland in Haute-Loire. He comes from a blended family from Belarus and Ukraine. His brother, Jacques Lanzmann, writer, will be a famous lyricist, we owe him the songs of Jacques Dutronc. As with everyone, Claude will be angry and reconciled with Jacques. The brothers have a sister, Evelyne, actress known as Evelyne Rey, who commits suicide at the age of 36.

Claude Lanzmann is 20 years old at the end of the Second World War, he finishes his schooling at Lycée Louis- great. He is already a grown adventurer in the war, he will become a journalist. Reader at the Free University of Berlin – in the American sector – he makes his first reports, a series for World, "Germany behind the Iron Curtain", smuggling to East Berlin . Back in Paris, he is carried away by the fascination for the couple Simone de Beauvoir-Jean-Paul Sartre who reigns over Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He joined the committee of the review Modern Times, founded in 1945 by Sartre and Beauvoir, at the heart of debates, reflections, commitments of intellectuals left in these post-war years. Lanzmann is impressed intellectually by Sartre, "this formidable machine thinking, connecting rods and pistons fabuleusement oiled", describes in the Patagonian Hare

«The Beaver and me

With Beauvoir, it's great love. "Little Lanzmann" and "Beaver" – nickname Simone de Beauvoir – will live together from 1952 to 1958, rue Victor-Schœlcher, above the Montparnbade cemetery. He will be the only man to move to Beauvoir. Couple ahead of her time, she is 44 years old, an age when, at that time, a woman is old – besides she feels old – he is 17 years younger. A pbadion. Beauvoir's letters, some of which have been published, are torrid, Lanzmann recounted their love in a special issue of Modern Times in 2008 – a review he has been directing since the death of the Beaver in 1986 – to celebrate the centenary of Beauvoir: "The Beaver and I had entered together, beating heart in this house – the first and the only one she ever owned – and had made a very in love housewarming … […] I had crossed the threshold with her, I had lived five crucial years of my existence and, even after our separation, I crossed it at least two nights a week, because we remained, until the end, united by an indestructible friendship, an egalitarian relationship, tied with love. " During their love years they traveled a lot, in Egypt, in Israel, in China, in Algeria. Lanzmann engages in the fight for the independence of Algeria, signs the manifesto of 121 against torture, militates against colonialism with Frantz Fanon. They sometimes travel at three, Beauvoir, Lanzmann and Sartre, "contingent" loves as they say, do not interfere with the eternal pact that binds Sartre and Beauvoir.

Until 1970, Claude Lanzmann has a dual identity: sophisticated intellectual to Modern times, with Beauvoir and Sartre and the other writers of Flore and Deux-Magots, journalist people for She in order to make a living . Very good journalist, real writer, he ended up republishing in 2012 his articles "food" in a book illustrated by a mosaic of Paestum, the Tomb of the divine diver (Gallimard, 2012). Lanzmann had understood what the American counterculture would later call "new journalism". We must read his failed interview with Richard Burton, his interview of Gainsbourg in 1965 in Le Touquet which balances "I write coldly for young people giving them what they want", his meetings with beginners as Charles Aznavour, son of poor Armenian artists fleeing the genocide. In 1962, he wrote for Elle the portrait of a 25-year-old actor who plays Brecht, Sami Frey. The magazine did not send him to talk about Brecht but to collect the confidences of Sami Frey about his love affair with Brigitte Bardot. Casting error: Lanzmann writes a beautiful article about Sami Frey: "Polish Jew, he only spoke the language of his parents, Yiddish, until the age of 6 years. Then, for two years, he was ordered to shut up, on pain of death. His voice would have betrayed him, would have designated him as a beast to slaughter. So he said to himself and "since", communication is pain. " Sami Frey's mother died in deportation at the age of 25. Lanzmann, after having forgotten Frey's romance with Bardot, deigns in the last line to conclude: "From the boulevard de Belleville and from the farthest Poland to Paul-Doumer Avenue – where Sami lives with Brigitte – the road was Fantastically long. " Lanzmann had humor and, already, his obsessions.

Baroudeur, he misses drowning in Israel, become deaf by diving with Cousteau, dying in multiple car accidents, getting lost in the mountains, but it bounces like its Patagonian hare. No desire to die. In 1967, he managed to publish a special issue of Modern Times, on the eve of the Six Day War: "The Arab-Israeli Conflict." For the first time, Jewish and Arab intellectuals meet each other in the same pages of a magazine. It is because of this conflict, and still of a pbadion of love, that he becomes a filmmaker with his first documentary film, Why Israel, in 1973. A film which begins and ends with the Holocaust. Anticolonialist militant and support of Israel? "There was never a contradiction for me, he said, I somehow have the Jewish question in the bones."

Anathemas and Controversies [19659004] He will spend twelve years of his life working on Shoah. Three hundred and fifty hours of rushes, interviews in camps, in Poland and all over the world where survivors live. He forces the door of the executioners who refuse to speak to him, he takes risks. In the large file that Liberation had devoted to Shoah on April 25, 1985, after having physically experienced the shock of a 9:30 am projection that puts the scene on the scene, we "Not an archival documentary, not a line of commentary: intellectual-filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann revives the mbadacre by the mere force of today's testimonies and images. Rebuilding, restoring and, ultimately, reliving what seemed forever obliterated. " And we added that during those years " to relive the nightmare of the unbearable event, if, on the ground, during the investigation, he was able to stay cold – "he had to" – he sometimes cried in the darkness of the editing room. " Simone de Beauvoir will write a text that will serve as a foreword to the book published with the film: "Despite all our knowledge, the horrible experience remained distant from us. For the first time, we live it, in our head, our heart, our flesh. It becomes ours. "

Lanzmann and Shoah eventually became confused. He has dedicated years to this film, he will spend years to complete it, until the last months. And to defend it. He will not hesitate to lead a crusade against Steven Spielberg who dared to deal with the subject in the form of fiction with Schindler's List, whereas Lanzmann, himself, has always been forbidden to fictionalize the Holocaust . According to him, there is no other film to make on the genocide after Shoah and the films that completed it. He erupts against journalists who write articles about the Holocaust without mentioning Shoah every time. He launches into anathemas and polemics around the testimony of the resistant Jan Karsky used in the novel of the same name by Yannick Haenel, he attacks Jonathan Littell who wrote the benevolent. Claude Lanzmann is a brawler, conflicts do not scare him. Besides, nothing scares him. It can threaten to death those who criticize Shoah or the "Shoah business". He gets angry with the whole world and is reconciled. As with Derrida, Sollers, Spielberg …

Lanzmann was not worried about old age or death. If his autobiographical book is called the Patagonian Hare, it is because he runs like a hare. This book, which he dictated from his hospital bed because he had caught a nasty illness while swimming in the North Sea and he was unable to hold a pen, is yet a great writer's book. "The hares, I thought about it every day throughout the writing of this book. Those of the Birkenau extermination camp, who slipped under the barbed wire impbadable for man, those who proliferated in the great forests of Serbia ndis I drove in the night, taking care not to kill them. Finally, the mythical animal that rises in the beam of my lighthouses after the village patagon of El Calafate, stabbed me literally the heart of the evidence that I was in Patagonia, that at that moment Patagonia and I were real together. This is the incarnation. I was almost 70 years old, but my whole being was leaping with wild joy, like at 20. "

He who had the courage to devote years of his life to the Holocaust – "Death itself, death and not survival" – will have the strength, January 18, 2017, in a freezing cold at Montparnbade cemetery, to stand up, on a small stand in the wind, in front of the grave of his 23-year-old son, Felix, to read the letter written by him to Dr. Charles Honoré. A log that tells the three years of battle against this disease that the young man had decided to win. "From the very beginning of this whole affair, he wrote, I had the tremendous and dizzying feeling that at last, in sickness, my freedom could be born. Faced with the eternal night I laid down my own law. " A magnificent text that this student, climber who succeeded Normale Sup despite cancer, wrote on his hospital bed, in 2016: " That's at age 22, as projected far ahead in my own time, I suddenly found myself with the same life expectancy as my father who was 90. It was breathtaking: like throwing a rock after the jet's airlessness, and the shattering sound of the final shock, he was silent, just at the edge of the void. "

Photos of Felix at all ages line the apartment Claude Lanzmann, annihilated, but refusing, as always, to abandon the fight. And life. "It will be understood, he says, that I love life to madness and that, close to leaving, I love it even more, to the point of not even believing in what I have just stated, a proposition of a statistical nature, therefore pure rhetoric, to which nothing replies in my bones and my blood. I do not know how my condition will be and how I'll behave when the time of the last call rings. I know, however, that this life so unreasonably loved will have been poisoned by a fear of the same height, that of driving me cowardly. "

Annette Lévy-Willard