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Claude Lanzmann was born in Paris in 1925 and died Thursday at the age of 92. His parents were Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe. When World War II broke out, his family was directly affected by Nazi racial politics in Vichy, France. He joined a communist youth organization and then the French Resistance, fighting against the Nazi occupation.
After the war, Lanzmann studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, becoming the archetype of the intellectual "Left Bank". He was a close friend of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who was also the lover of Lanzmann's sister, Evelyne.
He then went to West Germany to teach, studying the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This puts him in touch with the eminent Parisian intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre, who invites him to work on his radical newspaper "Les Temps modernes". Lanzmann then took over his editorial direction.
Sartre and Lanzmann became friends and colleagues, and Lanzmann was for several years the lover of Simone de Beauvoir. Lanzmann then embarks on a career as an explorer writer, traveling the world to cover topics such as life in North Korea and China in the 1950s, Algerian independence and the Dalai Lama, for a series French periodicals.
This philosophical, literary and investigative dimension of Lanzmann's character remained with him throughout his career and influenced his subsequent film work.
Without doubt, he always wore Sartre with him. He said, "I am the creator, the director, and the author of" Shoah "- the French word for author ( author ) nicely blurring the boundaries between l & # 39; 39; idea of a writer and that of a director with a thematic and stylistic trend of signature.
The screen was simply an alternative way of projecting one's philosophical, literary and journalistic concerns. In the company that he kept, and the way he conceived and talked about his ideas, we can consider Lanzmann as one of the most prominent public postwar intellectuals in France.
A decisive moment for Lanzmann came in 1952 when Le Monde commissioned him to write a series of articles on the nascent state of Israel.
After a long trip there, he decided that neither journalism nor a book were the correct formats for such a subject – all the more so that he had such a personal resonance.
A new visit to Suez in the late 60s is decisive and he decides to become a filmmaker. The results were "Why Israel" ("Israel, Why"), which was published in 1973, coinciding with the Yom Kippur War. He introduced us to his signature technique of representing a variety of interviewees and their points of view, but without the voiceover narrative that brings them together or clarifies them.
Based on this film, Alouph Hareven, then director general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, argued that Lanzmann was the only director capable of making a film that would not be on the Shoah but that be the Shoah. He even proposed that Israel finance the film if Lanzmann completed it within 18 months and it was ending in less than two hours.
Lanzmann began working on what would be his masterpiece in 1973, and it took 12 years of filming and editing to complete the epic nine and a half years, "Shoah".
Lanzmann compiled more than 300 hours of footage, traveling to 14 countries and interviewing over 50 people. In order to reduce costs – Lanzmann had to collect the funds himself – as well as for aesthetic simplicity, he used a single 16 mm camera to film the film and record the sound simultaneously. His postproduction was to edit the 350 hours of footage that he had accumulated.
In his mix of interviews with survivors, pbaders-by and executioners, interspersed with long panoramic landscape pastoral plans – including the countryside, camp remains, towns, villages and traveling trains – Lanzmann has documented the Holocaust in a way that has never been repeated.
To paraphrase a historian, "Shoah" transformed the testimony, especially with regard to the idea of testifying.
Coupled with his emphasis on the testimony was a stress on the details, minutiae, the ordinary and ordinary of the Holocaust. Lanzmann puts himself at the heart of "Shoah" both literally and figuratively. We hear him and see him, even as he secretly films footage with ex-Nazis. These included guards in the death camps.
"Shoah" is unparalleled in the history of film history and the representation of the Holocaust in the cinema. The film critic for The Guardian has described it as "one of the most remarkable films ever made." Lanzmann's refusal of compromise and the length of the film make it an autonomous work.
Lanzmann refused to use archival footage and he put "Shoah" in the present. His refusal was and remains remarkable, even revolutionary. Can we imagine a documentary film that uses nothing of the past? While "Night and Fog" by Alain Resnais (1956) previously relied on archival footage but juxtaposed with the current day it was shot, "The time of the ghetto" of Frederick Rossif (1961) included Nazi footage, Lanzmann rejected such an approach.
In revisiting the Holocaust, Lanzmann badumed a moral and historical responsibility – one that has eluded many people (judging by the failure of Stanley Kubrick to make a film about the world). Holocaust).
Like any post-Holocaust Jew, Lanzmann openly admits that he could have been a victim, that it could have happened to him.
But for Lanzmann, it was closer than most. He had known the terror of hiding, pretending to identity, risking exposure and arrest, torture and death. Simone de Beauvoir described how "he seemed to carry the weight of an ancestral experience on his shoulders".
Lanzmann did not describe Shoah as a documentary, but rather as a fiction of the real. His categorical refusal to use archival footage or photography opposed the dean of French cinema in the New Wave post-war. Jean-Luc Godard.
Against Lanzmann, Godard's "Histoire (s) du cinéma" (1988-1998) included archive footage, including images of the liberation of Belsen. Godard argued for the centrality of imaging, while Lanzmann argued that it was his obligation to "replace" it not because it is "missing" but because it would be "obscene" to show it.
Even though he found pictures of "3,000 people dying together in a gas chamber," he said, "I would never have included that in my movie." would have preferred to destroy it. "
Godard said that while believing in the status of images, Lanzmann only believed in the power of words.
Their debate touched the heart of the question of how film can document reality – especially a reality like the Holocaust, which encompbaded any film inspired by the "Shoah," which it either documentary or fictional.
In fact, we got so used to the grainy aesthetic in black and white through which many of us have learned about the existence of the Holocaust, that 's what happened to us. it is difficult to conceive that this really happened in color. So much so that when Steven Spielberg shot "Schindler's List" (1993), he relied on that same "look" to give authenticity to his film. Lanzmann calls this a "production of archives".
Without doubt, even today, a color film of the Holocaust like "The Gray Zone" or "Son of Saul" does not "look" well. Yet, remarkably, Lanzmann shot "Shoah" in color.
After "Shoah", in 1994, Lanzmann returned to Israel. In his five-hour documentary titled "IDF", he explored the Israeli army and what it tells us about Israel's national identity and character.
Much of his previous work is evident here. As in "Shoah", he films entirely in the present, renouncing archival footage and an authoritarian narrator. He lets his interlocutors – including Ariel Sharon, Avigdor Feldman, David Grossman and Amos Oz among others – talk at length. He intersperses these conversational lead scenes with slow and sweeping views of the Israeli countryside, so that the contested territory is always brought to the fore and never far from the viewer's mind.
In a region and subject hotly disputed, Lanzmann explained that it was not intended to provide a balanced or rounded version, but rather the aesthetic vision of an author.
Although Lanzmann is synonymous with "Shoah", he has made other films about the Holocaust. These include "Shoah: a visitor of the living" (1997); "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 pm ." (2001); "The Karski Report" (2010); and "The last of the unjust" (2013). And in "Claude Lanzmann: Spectacles of the Shoah" (2015), which he did not direct, he recounts the long and difficult process of research, filming, editing and presenting of "Shoah".
Lanzmann will be remembered primarily as the director of "Shoah". But he leaves behind an inheritance as a figurehead in the French and Jewish intellectual and cinematographic scene of the post-war period.
His work, however, has as much to tell us about documentary filmmaking as it does about two of the major preoccupations of the international Jewish community in the post-war period: the Holocaust and the State of America. 39; Israel.
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