38
PARTISAN REVIEW
ing, hypnotic rhythm, full of echoes and repetitions, transitions and
translations. At moments this feels to us like an ordeal, mimicking
the larger ordeal of the filmmaker and even the victims. But the film
never assaults the audience or falls into self-pity or self-righteousness;
what we hear is worth the emotional price we pay. Never has a film
depended so heavily on the spoken word or believed as much in the
urgency of unearthing the exact truth. To get at this truth Lanzmann
lies shamelessly to the Nazis he manages to interview, posing as an
historian, promising them anonymity while filming them with hidden
equipment. These grainy scenes have a different visual (and moral)
texture from the rest of the film; the crude pictures and thriller de–
vices convey the furtiveness of the beasts he's stalking and the single–
minded fury of his quest for evidence.
One of these reluctant witnesses, an important SS officer from
Treblinka named Franz Suchomel, provides him with just the kind
of step-by-step procedural descriptions he is always after. He is the
one who heartily compares the efficiency ofTreblinka and Auschwitz
as death factories and carefully scales down Lanzmann's figures on
the daily output, as if they were too flattering. In a memorable scene
that begins the second half of the film, he even sings a camp song that
"worker Jews" were forced to learn, vowing their loyalty and duty to
Treblinka, their "destiny." Lanzmann is so transfixed by the perfor–
mance he presses the old man to sing it again, louder. "Satisfied?"
the man asks. "That's unique. NoJew knows that today." Elsewhere,
when Suchomel feels obliged to defend himself Lanzmann assures
him, quite honestly, that "we're not discussing you, only Treblinka."
Lanzmann has no interest in Nazis as individuals, or even as war
criminals, but the most minute curiosity about Treblinka as a func–
tioning organism - an interest which Suchomel seems glad to gratify.
The uncanny match between Lanzmann's probing and this
Nazi's straight factual recollections recurs in the filmmaker's evident
rapport with Raul Hilberg, the only Holocaust historian who appears
in the film and the man whose operational approach seems in many
ways to have inspired it. Like Hilberg's massive book,
Shoah
is un–
usual in Holocaust studies in having no grand theory, no overt qual–
ity of metaphysical anguish or ethical interpretation. When he first
appears Hilberg indicates the basis of his life's work in words that
could also serve as a keystone for the movie: "In all my work I have
never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid
that I would come up with small answers." He adds that he prefers to
deal with "minutiae or details" in order to form "a picture which, if
