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Claude Lanzmann, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, died Thursday in Paris, at the age of ninety-two years. His 1985 film "Shoah", the crucial cinematic confrontation with the Holocaust (a word that Lanzmann hated), changed the history of cinema with its absolute absence of archive footage, with its incarnation from history to the present, first-hand, act of political engagement in the first person. He changed political history with his journalistic revelations and his moral intuitions. But Lanzmann 's creation of "Shoah", although the product of a permanent inspiration, was the result of a series of accidents. Every life is true, but Lanzmann's encounters with chance were particularly frank and provocative. He challenged life to bring him to a very early age, and from an early age he had a clear and pugnacious idea of what life brought – death. Rather than fleeing or hiding from death, he confronted him, as if he could better fight his enemy by keeping him within sight.
The first words of his 2009 autobiography, "The Patagonian Hare", are "The Guillotine"; the first chapter is devoted to the litany of victims and executioners whose stories have occupied his life and filled his imagination, and the story of his life involves a daring action and a dangerous adventure that preceded – and are inseparable – of his work as a filmmaker. As a teenager in Nazi-occupied France, he was active in the Resistance. As a Jew, he lived with the momentary knowledge that the Gestapo could take away from him. As a professor of philosophy in the post-war Berlin – while he was still in his twenties – he snuck into East Germany to pursue his own journalistic investigation was published , in The World in 1951): "As soon as one decides to break the law, everything becomes in reality relatively easy. Let's just say that I was sometimes very scared and still very lucky. "
Lanzmann had published another report from Germany in Modern Times the magazine founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he joined them as a publisher. He and Beauvoir became a couple, living together from 1952 to 1959. While Sartre's existentialism faced the immanence of death in life as a theoretical but absolute enigma that confused logic and morality, Lanzmann was an existentialist in action, whose philosophical education dimension of the practical challenge of death – from the validation of life through an incessant challenge to death and a temporary victory over death.His policy sense was similarly conditioned by a practical approach to power, although he admires Sartre's book "anti-Semitic and Jewish", he repudiated the notion of persecution and victimization as a defining Jewish characteristic – and this idea has been revealed to be this it has energized the "Shoah". (It also spurred his devotion to Israel, which he first visited in 1952 and about which he made two films.)
Lanzmann was prosecuted in 1960 for his public opposition to the war from France to Algeria. He has traveled extensively, writing for a variety of publications (including the most popular, as She ), was on the rewriting desk at the French equivalent of a tabloid, and has did journalism on television – while pursuing a diverse range of intrepid and even reckless adventures that made a great romantic contrast with its minor but admirable public activities. (I've been discussing Lanzmann's life story and work when the English translation of "The Patagonian Hare" came out in 2012).
Indeed, Lanzmann was secretly famous, and this secret – the contrast between his vast vitality. intellectual and physical) and his modest (albeit substantial) public achievements sparked what has proven to be his enduring work. In his journalism and political activities, he was engaged in the horrors of the century, but he still ran another risk, which seemed strangely great for some of his intellect, his energy and his abilities: an almost non-existence in the public sphere, a figure in history. It was history but it was not yet part of it, and its path into history turned out to be, in itself, another of the defining forces of history. time: the cinema.
Lanzmann was saved by the cinema. He was not a film buff, a movie buff or a critic; he did not have any particular cinematographic aspirations. For Lanzmann, as for many other great filmmakers, the technical art was a substitute for all the other arts, the art that became accessible by the fact that it required little occupation but rather technical – the camera did most of the work and seemed to be open on both sides, simultaneously recording what was happening in front of the lens and the ideas that motivated it. He made "Shoah" almost by accident; After finishing a documentary on Israel, he was approached by an Israeli official with a commission to make a film about the Holocaust from the Jewish point of view. It was supposed to be a standard movie that would be done in a few years; it turned out to be a nine and a half hour movie that took a dozen years to complete.
He said that the subject of the film was death, that he made the film in order to evoke what could not be shown-namely, the death in the Treblinka gas chambers , Auschwitz, Chelmno and the other Nazi death camps. "Shoah", although relying on a diligent, arduous and sometimes very risky journalistic investigation (notably in his surreptitious recording in West Germany of former concentration camp officials, who l. have both been severely beaten by the Germans and charged by the German government) is a work of imagination. His interviews, which he edited with his filming of the places (mainly in Poland) where the camps and their remains were located, put the Holocaust in the present and bear witness to both the incarnation of death and the lasting act of resistance to death.
Survival is the other big topic of "Shoah"; Lanzmann's interviews include former members of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto and members of the Sonderkommando, Jewish captives in Auschwitz who were forced, on pain of death, to prepare other Jewish prisoners for murder, driving them into the gas chamber, then removing their corpses. It is an act of deep and overwhelming moral understanding that Lanzmann places these survivors of Nazi terror side by side. Survival was, for Lanzmann, an act of resistance, and members of the Sonderkommando are present in the film as the closest witnesses, the ultimate opponents of death itself.
"The Shoah" places Lanzmann at the center of modern history. He has confronted his moral burden and his tragic conscience in the books he has written (in addition to his autobiography, there is a wonderful collection of his shorter plays, "The Divine Divine Tomb"), and in his later films. The Last of the Unjust ", of 2012
The virtual existence of Lanzmann, as a director of a film that quickly became historical, transformed his current existence – he became a sudden and crucial public figure whose frequent statements, interviews and engagements were themselves part of the story of his time. He wore this coat solemnly, severely, combatively. Meeting Lanzmann, as I have done several times, had to meet an impressive presence: he had a severe look, a fierce look and a brusque manner, which enveloped a deep trace of joy and generosity – his love of the life has emerged in his ardor for personal connection. His four-part work, "The Four Sisters," based on interviews with four women for "Shoah," was presented at the New York Festival last fall, and he came to New York to present it. His trip was not easy. he was ninety-one and had gone online for the film, for women, for the experience that he embodies, including his own, in carrying it out . This film, too, is the story of survival against all odds. But each survival story has the same end.
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