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Excellent: In February 2013, Claude Lanzmann at the Berlinale in the country of the tormentors honorary bear (dpa)
His intellectual fate was that French filmmaker and journalist Claude Lanzmann, died in Paris on Thursday at the age of 92, was relatively late – and yet fit enough to be the renovator of the In 1973, when the descendant of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe was in At the end of his forties, he turned to "Why Is Rael, his first documentary."
Finally, it was the means with which he hoped to reach the limit of what was being said, an unprecedented trauma: this indescribable rupture of civilization in this country before the publication of its masterpiece under the rather hidden than thematized Auschwitz figure.For twelve years, Claude Lanzmann worked on the epic film project "Shoah" (1985). 19659004] The title lakonic speaks little about technical and, above all, emotional effort required to complete this solitaire. This aesthetic and moral step in the artistic exploration of the Holocaust lasts nine and a half hours. Whoever exposes himself to this two-part documentary film will never forget it: Lanzmann questions contemporary Holocaust witnesses, victims and perpetrators of violence
"A crutch for emotions"
The movie does not show a single corpse, but an endless slow camera shots along the scene where the organized genocide of Jews unfolded. And intensive interviews, sometimes reminiscent of questions – and that carry the horror of the Nazi extermination camps so oppressive because they demonstrate tremendous resistance to the repression of the victims.
Among them, the narrative thread dedicated to Abraham Bomba, Jewish barber, Jewish women in the gas chamber of Treblinka concentration camp had to cut their hair. Lanzmann interviews him in a hair salon in Tel Aviv. On the one hand, because he hopes the same gestures "could be a support, a crutch for the emotions, and that they could help him work on the words, the demonstration that he would have to perform in front of the camera. "
On the other hand, Bomba had confided the director before the shoot, without scissors or comb in hand, he would not be able to talk about this horrible center of fear. When Lanzmann addresses the central issue with gentle insistence, the hairdresser struggles long before his hesitant response: "What did you feel when you first saw all these women and these naked children pouring into the room?" to gas? »
In the key stage materials, Lanzmann explains the setting reference: "Naked, frightened to death of women of the Ukrainian guards, the Jewish women, 70 by push, entered the gas chamber, where 17 trained hairdressers were waiting for them, made them sit on wooden benches provided for this purpose and with four scissors cuts. When I ask Abraham to repeat these gestures while filming, he grabs the head of his friend, his alleged client, and shows how and how fast he goes, turning his head back and forth, You cut that off, here … and here … this page … this page, and everything was over. Two minutes per woman, nothing more. Without the scissors, the scene would have been a hundred times less suggestive, a hundred times less powerful. But maybe that could not even happen: the scissors allow him to illustrate his relationship and at the same time to continue, to catch his breath and his strength, so impossible and so consuming that's what it's all about. He has to say. "
is both painful and terribly meaningful." You simply can not imagine what it means to make a man like Abraham Bomba speak on camera, "said Lanzmann in an interview in 2013. "It's impossible. It was only by preparing me so well that I already knew everything and that I could help my interlocutors during difficult times. "
A haunting aesthetic
The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who spent seven years at Lanzmann in a year before her death, she was still finishing the film, of which she knew how many sweat and tears, confrontation and sorrow he had tasted. "I have never read or seen anything that made me so clearly aware of the horror of the Final Solution, something that would have put in day its infernal mechanisms with such clarity, "she wrote in 1985." A monument "is this film," which will allow future generations to understand one of the darkest and most confusing moments in their history. "
This understanding works through a haunting aesthetic that corresponds to the singularity of the breakup of civilization.In" Shoah "not a second with archival documents, because it's not the way I think and work, and, by the way, a such material does not exist, "said Lanzmann once. "If I had found a movie – a secret film because it was forbidden to shoot – shot by the SS, showing how 3000 Jews – men, women, children – are dying together in the gas chamber of the Crematorium 2 at Auschwitz, not only would I not have shown it, I would have even destroyed it, I do not know why. "
The obscenity that would have emanated from such a film was again addressed by Lanzmann several times But especially the initiation that him allowed to shoot: "I made the film, but the film also made me," he said in an interview, all the more so as his knowledge of the Holocaust was "small and derisory" However, with the filming of "Shoah" he found his subject, which was his duty and content of life, as hard as it had been often.
Sensitive and intelligent [19659006] The degree Lanzmann's high level of political sophistication and persistence stem from his youthful commitment to Communist youth movement in France, the French resistance movement. Two years after the end of the Second World War, he studied philosophy in Tübingen. One of the few Frenchmen returns quickly to the country of the authors. Later, he worked as a professor at the Free University of Berlin and worked as editor of the magazine "Modern Times" founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
Lanzmann campaigned for the end of the war of Algeria. in China and Korea. He devoted himself to the film only in the early 1970s. The documentary "Why Israel", in which he addresses his examination of his own Jewish identity, and the twelve-year work on "Shoah" were followed by D & D Other films that were due to the work of the Nazi atrocities, including "Sobibor" and "The Last of the Not Fair."
Recently, he had become silent around this relentless fighter against oblivion, who had lived in Paris with his third wife Dominique Petithory. Fans praised Lanzmann on Thursday as an ingenious documentary director. He had shown with sensitivity and intelligence what was the Holocaust, said Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld. Christoph Heubner, Vice President of the International Committee of Auschwitz, said that "Lanzmann's images" gave voice to all those who were silenced and murdered in the darkness of the Holocaust in the camps of German extermination. His films are works against silence, suppression and forgetfulness. "
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