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Claude Lanzmann, a French Jewish journalist, author and filmmaker who died on July 5 at the age of 92, did not believe in the proverb "Live and Let Live". As he explains in his memoirs "The Patagonian Hare" his famous film "Shoah" (1985) aggressively demanded the pursuit of Nazi murderers to demand explanations of their crimes. Fortunately, Lanzmann reveled in being something of a bullvan Yiddish term meaning a person or a brutal ox in meaningful as well as trivial things.
In a memorable column, the critic Roger Ebert describes a meeting with Lanzmann at a buffet lunch at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. The filmmaker came out ahead of other people lining up to fill his plate of shrimp. Faced by Ebert, Lanzmann refused to back down. Ebert adds that a friend recalled how during a screening of "Shoah" in New York, he tried to introduce Lanzmann to his mother, a Holocaust survivor: "[Lanzmann] l & rsquo; Touched. "
Lanzmann's attention in" Shoah "was not about individual victims or survivors, but about the relentless machine that was destroying most European Jews. this machine meant spraying spectators with 9 1/2 hours of testimony in an endless reality TV show.The overwhelming results were not to everyone's taste.The American Jewish critic Pauline Kael notoriously did not appreciate "Shoah" as an example of cinematographic style.The bold panoramic of "Shoah" by Kael remains a taboo subject with some readers, to the point where it has been ostensibly omitted from a recent collection of his writings from the Library of America.
Born in a suburb he Parisian of Belarussian parents and Bessarabians of Jewish origin, Lanzmann fought in the Resistance in occupied France, but claimed to be fully aware of the persecution of the Jews only after reading "Antisemite and Jew of Jean-Paul Sartre: A exploration of the etiology of hate ". (1946) Journalist in the tradition of Russian Jewish journalist Joseph Kessel, Lanzmann became a filmmaker at the age of 40. The documentary "Israel, why" (1973) preceded "Shoah", which lasted 12 years. His later films included "IDF" (1994), on the Israeli Defense Forces, and other documentaries on the Holocaust. This month, "The Four Sisters" was premiered on French television. The new documentary shows survivors of the Holocaust in interviews filmed decades ago.
Accustomed to reality, Lanzmann would launch fierce criticism on fictionalized versions of the Holocaust, even popular ones. He called Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List" of "kitschy melodrama". Lanzmann was not enthusiastic about Holocaust-themed literary fiction, finding the basic premise of a Nazi recollection in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (2006) incredible. Lanzmann wrote in Le Nouvel Observateur in September 2006 that he had spent a dozen years trying to obtain complicity or wrongdoing from Nazi war criminals during the filming of "Shoah". How did the main character of Littell "burn 800 pages"? ? Lanzmann had even more contempt for Yannick Haenel 's award – winning novel "The Messenger" (2009) about Jan Karski, a Polish diplomat who was trying to inform the Allied forces about Hitler' s plans for the war. Holocaust. In an article published in Marianne magazine in February 2010, Lanzmann grumbled that in Haenel 's novel, a "Karski' s imaginary has things to say that he never thought or said, that 's what. he could not have thought, to falsify the man and the story. "At least Littell's research was accurate," Lanzmann conceded, in contrast to Haenel's "weakness of intelligence." In response, Lanzmann released a 49-minute film, "The Karski Report," containing his Own interviews filmed with Karski Paradoxically, Lanzmann praised another French novel on the Holocaust, "HHhH" by Laurent Binet (2010) for his use of historical sources on how the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich was killed in Prague during the Second World War
all fights, vehement and vehement disgusts, were the sense of sardonic humor of Lanzmann, better expressed in the original French texts than He did not want to be precise about films intended to chant Hollywood war films, so he claimed to enjoy Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds." (2009)
Lanzmann would probably have been amused by a tribute of the French Jewish journalist Jean Hatzfeld on the radio France-Info. Hatzfeld told listeners that Lanzmann was "very controversial because his personality was a bit rough on the edges … [Lanzmann] was rather self-centered, rather vain, with immense generosity and kindness … Those who are a bit sensitive or easily offended could be but I was amused by it.I have never found it unbearable … His selfishness has amused me because I think if you made a movie like & "Shoah", you have the right to be a little pretentious. "
Another laudative badysis on France-Info historian
Annette Wieviorka, who noted that Lanzmann had the talent to get people to talk, that "historians are not very good." This provocative ability to attract people, victims, and murderers meant that "the word is always center "Wieviorka was referring to a scene in" Shoah "where Avraham Bomba, a prisoner who had worked as a barber in the death of Treblinka.L decades later, Lanzmann insists that this On July 1, a few days before death Lanzmann, Simone Veil, a French lawyer and politician who survived Auschwitz, was ceremonially buried in the French Pantheon, the resting place of national heroes, a generation of those who valiantly fought the fate of Europe's Jews. the attention of the world is disappearing.
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward function.
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