Chronicler of the unspeakable: Claude Lanzmann is dead – Politics: News and reports

The French filmmaker and journalist Claude Lanzmann, who died Thursday in Paris at the age of 92, found his intellectual fate relatively late – but timely enough to go down in history as a revelation of the European culture of remembrance. descendants of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, he shot "Why Israel", his his first documentary.Finally, it was the means by which he hoped to reach the limits of the word, an unprecedented trauma: this indescribable rupture of civilization, rather concealed rather than addressed in this country before the publication of its moving Hauptwerk under the figure Auschwitz

.For a dozen or so years , Claude Lanzmann worked on the epic film project "Shoah" (1985). The title lakonics speaks little of the technical and, above all, emotional effort that the completion of this solitary claimed. 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 no longer forget it: Lanzmann meets with contemporary Holocaust witnesses, victims and executioners. The film does not show a single corpse, but very slow pursuit shots along the places where the organized genocide of the Jews took place. 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 that the same gestures "could be a support, a crutch for the emotions, and that they could make it easier for him to 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 tackles the central issue with gentle insistence, the hairdresser struggles for a long time before stopping: "What did you feel when you first saw all these women and these naked children pouring themselves into the gas chamber? "

On the key stage, Lanzmann explains the frame of reference:" Naked, frightened to death by the eyelashes of the Ukrainian guards, the Jewish women, each 70 by thrust, entered the gas chamber, where 17 trained hairdressers were waiting for them, on a wooden bench provided for this purpose and cut all his hair with four paper cups. As I ask Abraham to repeat these gestures as he turns around, he grabs the head of his friend, his alleged client, and shows how and how fast he goes by turning his head back and forth: "You cut it , here … and there … this page … this page, and all was over. Two minutes per woman, no 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 possible only by preparing me so well that I knew everything and that I could help my interlocutors during difficult times. "

The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who had a conjugal relationship with Lanzmann for seven years, had trouble A year before her death, she completed the film of which she knew how much the sweat and the tears, the confrontation and the mourning had cost him. "I have never read or seen anything that made me so clearly aware of the horror of the Final Solution, something that would have exposed its infernal mechanisms with such clarity", she writes in 1985. "A monument" is this film, "which will enable 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 rupture of civilization.in "Shoah" not a second with archival documents, because it is not the way I think and work, and, in passing, such material does not exist ", declaimed 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 can not say why. "

The obscenity that would have emanated from such film has been discussed by Lanzmann several times. But most importantly, the initiation that allowed him to shoot. "I did the film, but the film also did me," he said in an interview. All the more so as his knowledge of the Holocaust had previously been "small and poor". With the shooting of "Shoah" but he found his subject that was his duty and his life content. As strong as it has often been,

Lanzmann's high degree of sophistry and perseverance stems from his youthful commitment to the French communist youth movement, 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 "Les Temps Moderne", founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Lanzmann campaigned for the end of the war in Algeria and traveled as a journalist to 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. "