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For some, he was a tyrant. For the others, he was a brute. And for many, he was a megalomaniac. But for most of those who work in documentary, he was simply the greatest documentarian – and perhaps the most important filmmaker – of the 20th century.
Claude Lanzmann, who died in Paris last Thursday at the age of 92, fundamentally changed the world's understanding of the Holocaust through the release of his 1985 magnum opus Shoah . The nine-and-a-half-hour film, made over 12 years from 1973, relied mainly on testimonies of Jewish survivors, Nazi authors and Polish witnesses to tell an oral story of the massacre of European Jews during the Second World War. World War. In what turned out to be a groundbreaking decision, Lanzmann avoided the use of archival footage and relied instead almost entirely on first-person interviews and on images of places to make his film
. the Shoah in the early 1970s, Holocaust education was not as advanced as today. Schindler's List The USC Shoah Foundation and the US Holmust Memorial Museum (USHMM) will all come much later. Spectators walked in a theater for a 9 o'clock all-day show, and emerged in the evening, pale, dizzy and disgusted by what they had seen. "Never would I have imagined such a combination of beauty and horror," wrote Simone de Beauvoir, lover and confidante of Lanzmann, after seeing the film during its world premiere in Paris.
33 years later, Shoah is considered a high watermark of the truth. A summit of possibilities for the non-fiction form, which has itself grown and evolved far beyond its early days of observation. Documentaries are now the mainstays of television and streaming services, thanks to the growth of cable networks and streaming platforms such as Netflix. But if it's a golden age for documentary, as is so often suggested, then why, socially, are we fighting so hard with the truth? In the era of false news, bots and widespread mistrust in journalism, where and how are we going to find the next Shoah ?
I had the chance to spend a week with Lanzmann in 2013, when he recounted 12 years of making his monolithic masterpiece. The interview became the backbone of a documentary that I directed on him, which was premiered in Toronto two years later. I found the 87-year-old Frenchman (at the time) aggressive and irascible – but also intelligent, poetic and introspective. He clearly recalled the years that he spent doing Shoah and they were not happy.
The heart of his film is his interviews with death camp survivors, many of whom had never shared their stories. to the camera, and some of them would never do it again. Lanzmann traveled the world hunting down these men and women, making great efforts to convince them to trust him with their memories. Here too, we must remember that it was new to many of them. In some cases, it was the first time that they were talking about their experiences of the Second World War, and their words were shocking even to close relatives
Lanzmann poses in his Paris office in 1985.
The testimony haunts. Mordechai Podchlebnik, a Jewish prisoner from Chelmno, forced to unload corpses from a van in which they had been gassed, discovers the bodies of his own wife and children. Desperately, begging, he begs the Nazis to kill him now, so that he can at least lie down next to them. They refuse. You are young, in good health, they say. We need you to work. Later, we will kill you later.
Then there is Szymon Srebrnik, forced to sing songs for the Germans aboard a riverboat while they threw the ashes of the cremated Jews into the water. He enters a sort of trance state by revisiting the site of the crimes now demolished. "It's the place," he says. Elsewhere, the Treblinka survivor, Yitzhak Zuckerman, simply told Lanzmann, "If you could lick my heart, it would poison you."
Perhaps no testimony is more upsetting than Abraham's. Bomba, the barber of Treblinka, who was forced to cut women's hair only a few moments before they were gathered in the gas chamber. Bomba breaks down while he remembers another barber from his hometown, who was forced to cut the hair of his own wife and his own sister
"I can not to do, it's too horrible. " 19659002] "Abraham, I know it's very hard and I'm sorry," Lanzmann replies, "but we have to do it."
The moment is the one that will be remembered in the cinema as long as there will be cinema, but was denounced by some critics and scholars, who felt that pushing traumatized survivors to tell their testimony went to the pale. Nevertheless, Lanzmann was fiercely defensive about this criticism
"It was not a sadistic game at all," he tells me. "It was, on the contrary, a fraternal situation.He was my brother.I was his brother.And I can tell you that the tears of Bomba were as precious as blood for me.They were the seal of truth. "
Beyond the many interviews with Jewish survivors, Shoah is notable for having included rare interviews with the authors. In all, Lanzmann recorded nine Nazis during his 12-year journey
If it's a golden age for documentary, as is so often suggested, then why do we socially struggle so much with the truth? to accomplish that, the filmmaker had to lie. After first approaching former SS officers for record interviews – approaches that have always been rejected, he even had an answer – Lanzmann has adopted a subterfuge. Using a false passport and creating a fake letterhead, he claimed to be a university researcher seeking to clarify the achievements of the Germans during the war. He would pay the old Nazis for their time, but their names and faces would not be revealed. After winning and eating several authors, a number agreed to participate
Of course, Lanzmann had no intention of protecting their anonymity. At the risk of his life, he used a hidden camera called Paluche, buried in a bag, to transmit images and sound to a van waiting outside.
Among those interviewed was Franz Suchomel, an SS officer from the Treblinka death camp. Suchomel recounts the technical details of the mass murder and proudly sings a song that the prisoners were forced to sing in the camp. "No Jew knows it today," he says. When the doors of the gas chambers were opened, "people fell like potatoes," he told Lanzmann
. The Jewish filmmaker kept calm while undertaking the interviews. "To make such a film, I had to have this rule in place," he said. "To stay cold, and to put aside my feelings." It was only after the film was over that his emotions resurfaced.
Lanzmann felt no shame in breaking his unofficial commitment to men who had committed such transgressions against humanity. "I publicly show in the film, with arrogance and with pride even, that I lie to them," Lanzmann told Roger Rosenblatt of PBS in 1987. "I n & # Do not try to hide my lies. And I do not see why I should have kept my word. Did they keep their word? They did not respect the first moral order, which is the order of life. They did not respect this first and fundamental priority, so why not lie to these people? "
Today, Lanzmann's choices are widely regarded as irreproachable, yet few current journalists embrace them.In J schools across North America, the interview is taught as a model-based technique to follow, the ethics of journalism by heart outweighs the general morality of reporting, yet Lanzmann's interviews with survivors, witnesses, and writers of 39 Holocaust of European Jews – who would never be accused of being "textbooks" – are considered historic and priceless.In fact, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has paid a six-figure sum to acquire all wealth of the Holocaust in the mid-1990s and worked diligently to restore them numerically and preserve them in the years that followed.] Jean-Paul Sartre (right), Simone de Beauvoir and Lanzmann (left ) , visit the Pyramids in Egypt in 1967.
AFP / Getty Images
Today's journalists are they too deferential to the ethics of journalism, at a cost to morality wider reports? I can not help but remember a hustle and bustle of two years ago, when rumors circulated that The New York Times had a secret and confidential record of presidential candidate Donald Trump claiming that he had not I actually believe what he was saying publicly about immigration. A hashtag has been ported: #ReleaseTheTape. But the Times declined
When one is dealing with a presidential candidate who admits to having lied with his public positions, what is the value of an unofficial commitment? The high moral? Answers to such questions are not easy, but they do spur discussion we should have.
Lanzmann, on the other hand, had no difficulty with such questions. For him, things were often black and white. Regardless of your ability to deal with Lanzmann, you were his best friend or biggest enemy. Fight for the causes of darkness or the causes of light. Even his lover, De Beauvoir, found his nature inexorable alarming, writing once that for a man of such intelligence, "his Manichaeism astonished me".
In 2013, at a Parisian luncheon with Nick Fraser, a BBC leader turned to the recent legalization of gay marriage in France. Lanzmann mocked and scowled. "It's ridiculous," he said. "Gay Marriage, Pft."
Surprised to hear this feeling of an open leftist, I asked him what grounds he might possibly oppose to the legalization of same-sex marriage. "Because it's a distraction from the really important issue of the day," he replied angrily, "which is the massive inequality between the rich and the poor." In his mind, there was little time for the trivial. that obstinately, Lanzmann would rarely say or admit blame for any matter. But he listened and considered criticism. After the liberation of from Shoah in 1985, a furious Polish government banned the film, accusing Lanzmann of having made a propaganda depicting the country as anti-Semitic, despite the death of many Poles during the war to protect the Jews.
Admittedly, Lanzmann knew the risk he would have incurred in stimulating denial of the Holocaust if he had ever excused himself for a single image of the Holocaust.
Lanzmann, as always, stood firm. And rightly so. But he later made The Karski Report, an independent film centered on the heroic envoy of the Polish resistance Jan Karski, who tried to warn President Roosevelt of the horrors that occurred in Europe
. ] Shoah was the lack of interviewed women who appear during the 10 hours of the film. Lanzmann's final documentary – the series in several parts The Four Sisters which is released theatrically in France the day before his death, inspired by Shoah and focuses entirely on the stories of four Jewish women.
Perhaps Lanzmann saw contrition as a sign of weakness, offering fuel to his enemies. Or perhaps he simply considered repair as more important than apology. Here too, there is food for thought for journalists today. As all excuses made by a well-meaning scribe for a factual error in a news article is presented as evidence of "false news", reporters must consider the value of an excuse. In the current climate, the phrase Times regrets the error, "attached to a minor factual correction, may prove fatal to public belief in the broader merits of". Lanzmann was certainly aware of the risk that he would have incurred in reinforcing Holocaust denial if he had ever apologized for a single Shoah .
When Lanzmann was talking about the work of his great life, he was so often angry defensive tone.However, this defensive attitude undoubtedly protected the film's legacy in the three decades that followed its release. to become a filmmaker, Lanzmann spent the first half of his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as The World and She and living a life of travel and adventure in Hemingway. His work took him to distant lands such as Algeria, North Korea, Morocco and China, and he became close to the famous circle of existentialist philosophers of the 1950s that included de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron and Albert Camus. It was only around the age of 40 that he embarked on film and it was only at the age of 60 that Shoah is released.
For the second half of his career, Lanzmann made death the work of his life. But death, unfortunately, kept Lanzmann in his eye-line as well. Although he lived up to 92 years, the filmmaker's life was constantly marked by loss. In 1966, his sister, actress Évelyne Rey, commits suicide. And in 1980, he said goodbye to his friend and mentor Sartre. Six years later, de Beauvoir passed away. The couple had lived together as lovers for seven years and had remained unshakable friends thereafter. "She was my best friend," he said. "She never let me lose hope, ever."
More heartache followed. His younger brother died in 2006 and his second wife, the German writer and actress Angelika Schrobsdorff, passed away in 2016. Finally, and perhaps most cruelly, Félix, Lanzmann's only son, died early 2017 of a form of aggressive cancer. He was just 23.
"Natural death does not exist", Lanzmann reflected on Charlie Rose in 2012. "Every death is violent."
With his death this month, we bid farewell to the last of the great French existentialist thinkers. It is tempting to suggest that the death of Lanzmann marks the loss of the last great documentary filmmakers, without hesitation, but in its place there are signs of hope.
This is where the bravery of Citizenfour director Laura Poitras, in the intellect of The act of killing creator Joshua Oppenheimer and in the l & # 39; Emotional honesty of emerging doctors such as Alexandria Bombach and Bing Liu. The weight of expectation rests heavily on their shoulders, as does the question of how to break through at a time of high quality factual content.
The theatrical release of Shoah was a landmark event. Before it was released on VHS tapes, there were only a few prints of the film, which meant that it could only be shown once a day, in a single theater, in just a few cities North American at a time. People lined up around the block to see him, spent the whole day at the theater, and built his reputation by word of mouth. It's a hard concept to grasp at the time of Netflix, Amazon and HBO.
"We had a difficult time, a difficult century," Lanzmann told me, in the last moments of our week together in Paris, "but less was an epic time." And there was greatness in that. "
The 21st century is now facing its own difficult period. As Europe collapses, America becomes nativists again and as Canada attends the rise of its own uncompromising politicians, the role of reporters – and especially thoughtful reporters ready to taking risks beyond the modeled relationships – is more important than ever. we must survive the assault on the truth itself, the world will need more journalists and documentarists like brutes, brutes and megalomaniacs. Maybe we need more of Claude Lanzmanns.
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