An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s SHOAH, by Jennifer Cazenave
By Abigail Gillman (World Languages & Literatures), August 2020
In summer 2020, Abigail Gillman (WLL) reviewed Jennifer Cazenave’s (Romance Studies) recent book about Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film SHOAH. Cazenave’s study received an honorable mention for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’s 2020 Best First Book Award. Professor Gillman’s own recent publication, A History of German Jewish Bible Translation, is reviewed by classist James Uden in the summer 2019 review featured in these pages.
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Jennifer Cazenave has written a fascinating, pioneering study of one of the most consequential works of Holocaust art: the nine-hour long documentary by French director Claude Lanzmann, daringly titled SHOAH.
I remember viewing SHOAH on two successive evenings in 1985 and being mesmerized by the genuine, intimate encounters with the faces, voices, and sites from the Holocaust. In those years, the concept of “testimony” was new in Holocaust research. Yale had just opened the first video archive for preserving and cataloguing survivor testimonies. Lanzmann’s film juxtaposes the testimonies of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, who speak about the war in their own words, and in their own languages—German, Sicilian, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish)—with a French translator in the room. Presented as an alternative to popular cinematic treatments, this film ostensibly promised, as Stuart Liebman writes, a “comprehensive history of the Holocaust in all its dimensions” (qtd. in Cazenave xxxii)—the product of a genius director who stayed on the sidelines and allowed his subjects to freely tell their stories.
In fact, SHOAH is a carefully edited and constructed representation of history; a lieu de mémoire; as flawed a performance of witnessing as any other.
The starting point of Jennifer Cazenave’s book is an extraordinary new development: the recuperation of the outtakes of SHOAH, amounting to 220 hours of interviews with survivors, perpetrators and others, which Lanzmann left on the cutting room floor. Salvaging this precious footage entailed shipping two tons worth of canisters from France to the U.S. in 1997; matching and synchronizing the negatives with the soundtrack; transferring to videotape and digitizing; and uploading the restored outtakes to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website, where they are now accessible to all. Cazenave explains that the organizing and cataloguing of the footage was an enormous feat, as Lanzmann left no master plan for his archive, no “playbook.”
Cazenave’s book is the first to describe and analyze these outtakes. Her work takes us into the archive of the making of the film, evaluating Lanzmann’s decisions and his methods of interviewing as he travelled around the world between 1973 and 1979, and then during the years of production 1979-1985. She studies Lanzmann’s filmmaking in the context of the postwar period following the Eichmann Trial in 1961, when the catastrophe was just beginning to be documented, very differently, in the U.S., Israel, and Europe. She provides a new perspective on Lanzmann’s career and legacy as a pre-eminent “docu-auteur.”
But her book has an even more ambitious agenda: to reinterpret the documentary as a whole; to re-integrate the outtakes into the history of SHOAH. Her study provokes us to read the documentary as a text structured around its multiple “omissions.” Her reframing of Lanzmann’s project is epitomized by the brilliant cover image of a scene that was not supposed to have been filmed, which Cazanave calls Lanzmann’s “collapse.”It shows Lanzmann burying his head in the chest of one of his subjects, ghetto fighter Yitzchak “Antek” Zuckerman, who comforts him while looking directly at the camera, with the Hebrew interpreter (herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors) only partially visible in the corner.
From this book, one also learns that Lanzmann did have collaborators, and also precursors, such as the avant-garde Israeli filmmaker David Perlov. The outtakes reveal that his interviews were rehearsed, choreographed, and often filmed repeatedly, to produce a desired effect and to elicit (at times in ethically problematic ways) a particular performance. From his off-camera “neutral” position, Lanzmann coached his interviewees to produce the narrative he wanted. He neglected to include numerous interviews with female survivors in the film, almost entirely eclipsing women’s stories of heroism and trauma, in order to produce what Cazenave calls “a universalizing—and overwhelmingly masculine—representation of traumatic memory in the present” (xxxv). He omitted many accounts of heroic resistance, and contentious interviews which exposed the “politics of rescue” which doomed European Jewry. In a striking insight, Cazenave notes that SHOAH casts the “bystander” as a Polish villager living in proximity to a killing field, rather than a western diplomat or government official who simply refused to act on what he knew in the 1940s.
These are just a few fascinating lessons from a book jam packed with history, creative interpretation, and critical insights about testimony, filmmaking, and the historiography of the Holocaust.