Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, widely hailed as “the greatest documentary ever made,” has become a landmark not just in filmmaking, but in the very DNA of its subject: the systematic genocide of Jews during the Second World War. Since its release in 1985, the film has practically transcended its categorisation as a documentary, instead being lauded as the definitive “act of witness” for the atrocities — a precious record of memory from those who witnessed, suffered, and perpetrated. For many, Shoah is no longer just a film about the Holocaust, it is an inextricable part of its legacy.
Few movies in history have achieved such status, and yet it was almost precisely what Lanzmann set out to achieve with this film, one whose production he obsessed over for 11 years. He was fuelled by the idea that not only must this story be told, but that he must be the one to tell it. The distinctions that Lanzmann is often at pains to assert in interviews reveal a tangible connection, perhaps even custodianship, he feels in the telling of the story of this genocide: for Lanzmann, it was not a holocaust, it was a Shoah — the Hebrew word for ‘catastrophe’ — the film is not a “documentary,” it is a “fiction of reality,” and it is not just about the deaths of over six million Jews, but death itself.
There are many things about Shoah that distinguish it from other documentaries — most glaringly its mammoth length — but more significant is Lanzmann’s choice not to include any archival material from the time. Instead, the film consists almost entirely of an interplay between just two elements: filmed testimony from interviews conducted by Lanzmann, and footage of the real locations where the events took place. This choice is fundamental to the core thesis of the film, which is to examine how the events of the past continue to reverberate through to the present. By omitting the slow zooms on grainy photographs or montages of black-and-white footage, Lanzmann doesn’t permit the audience any distance from the Holocaust, he forces us to reckon with its tangible, permanent scars.
However, what makes the absence of those elements even more powerful is the subliminal feeling it imposes on the audience that we are not entitled to access the past. It results in a profound feeling of emptiness, and it’s that feeling that ends up being arguably just as powerful as even the most graphic footage from the camps themselves. The reason why Shoah is considered to be so important is that it is one of the most comprehensive works of remembrance for the over six million people that were killed. A quote from Isiah that opens the film states, “I will give them an everlasting name.” But as Lanzmann said, this is a film about death, not eternal life. Shoah is as much a monument of remembrance, as it is a showcase of its limits, and of the moral ambiguity we encounter as a result.
Some of Shoah’s most painful, and even controversial moments, are the ones that demonstrate the human cost of remembrance. One of the first survivors interviewed is a man called Michaël Podchlebnik, one of only two Jews to survive the Nazi extermination of the village of Chelmno. He smiles as he says to Lanzmann that “everything died in him” when the Nazis came to his village. He continues to smile when he says that he thanks God for “what remains,” and “that he can forget.” It’s a reminder that ‘remembrance’ is a privilege enjoyed by those who were not forced to suffer these atrocities, and that in order to live, some people must choose to forget what happened. Another survivor, Abraham Bomba, who is interviewed whilst working as a barber in Tel Aviv, recounts how he was forced to cut the hair of other Jews before they were murdered, including many of his close friends. Despite repeatedly pleading that he can’t go on, Lanzmann pushes him to finish his story, and whilst it is an emotionally powerful scene it ends up leaving a bad taste. It is perhaps one of the few moments where Lanzmann goes too far.
However, in witnessing Lanzmann’s brazen entitlement to Abraham’s story, he also implicates us as viewers, and our own need to learn more about these horrific events in the name of remembrance. Whilst Germany is often lauded for its teaching of the history of the Holocaust, countries such as the UK and the US have barely begun to assess their own role in those six million deaths and how they failed to prevent or halt the killings. As a result, there is an inherent moral ambiguity in making this man relive his trauma for the purposes of our remembrance, when it happened to him whilst the world looked away.
Much of contemporary remembrance is about building things: erecting monuments or inscribing names. Shoah is a film made up largely of empty spaces and nameless places: slow pans across fields that only reveal more forest, crawling camera moves that somehow take us no closer. At just over nine hours in length, the film is in no rush to make any second of it pass quicker than it should. The cinematic anatomy of Shoah is a fascinating blend of this type of minimalism juxtaposed with much bolder artistic flourishes, born out of Lanzmann’s background in existentialism and the French New Wave. Of the few criticisms that the film garnered, most spawn from these moments where Lanzmann seemingly breaks his creative restraint, such as the film’s mesmerising opening that stages a haunting re-enactment of one man’s past.
Szymon Srebnik, the other survivor of the village of Chelmno, sings at the end of a small rowboat. It is a song he once sang to entertain SS Men as they emptied sacks of powdered bone into the river, a song that for a time ensured his survival. For some viewers, to make someone re-enact such a trauma for the sake of a dramatic opening is in poor taste, but it’s in this scene where Lanzmann’s “fiction of reality” truly comes into focus. His intent with such a moment isn’t to try and recreate the past, but to emphasise its uncanniness in doing so. What we are left with is a deep melancholy and a harsh truth: whilst the past may continue to reverberate in myriad ways, there are some things that are simply lost forever. The song and the river remain the same, but that young boy is now an old man, one who will never be the same person he once was before the Germans came.
Whether fiction or not, any film that interacts with the legacy of the Holocaust risks getting things wrong. A narrative that seeks to find meaning in the events can be construed as an affront to the true reality of the horror. Equally, a documentary that seeks to provide any concrete answers can often rob the events of their true complexity. To “teach the Holocaust,” many would argue you have to first teach the idea that it can’t truly be understood. Nevertheless, Holocaust remembrance is widely considered to be a vital part of human history, and coupled with the current rise of anti-semitism and fascism, an increasingly relevant one. Whilst we may disagree on the various ways we try to tell the story of the Holocaust, one thing that is agreed upon is that we must tell it regardless.
Nevertheless, how we tell that story is equally as important as the fact that it be told. Our most human impulses will always lead us to look beyond simply just “remembering” the tragedy, but to try and understand it on a deeper level. How could humans do this to other humans? What are we supposed to do with the knowledge this happened? Without those answers, we are left with a grief that it feels like we can’t process, an emotional weight that is so heavy it makes us feel powerless. Many of our remembrance ceremonies are directly designed to provide an escape from that feeling. That is because often when we embrace the full truth behind so many atrocities, more people become implicated in them, and uncomfortable truths come to light.
In Britain, Remembrance Sunday is intended to mark not only the millions of lives lost in the First World War, but also — according to the Royal British Legion — all of those who died on active service in “all conflicts” since. The human cost that generations of British people have had to endure throughout the 20th century as a result of armed conflict is immeasurable and deserving of remembrance. Yet, once we ask the harder questions about what exactly we are remembering, things become more complicated. For example, it is unclear whether the Royal British Legion include those who died whilst on service in Northern Ireland, or in military operations done in service of British Colonialism.
The reason that most ceremonies of modern remembrance will always fall short is because they are controlled by institutions who were in some way complicit in the atrocities. Remembrance Sunday mandates that every year, the same monarchy and government that oversaw these conflicts, engage in the same minute of silence and repetitive ceremony of wreath-laying. The purpose of these hollow rituals is not simply to remember, or to mourn, but to somewhat justify their past actions by implying the idea that all of these deaths, in “all conflicts,” should be viewed as sacrifices. It leaves no room for the real pit of grief that lies at the heart of these deaths, which is that many of them died not protecting democracy, but at the whims of an unfeeling state.
This sort of state-sponsored remembrance is of course not isolated to Britain; every September, America joins together to collectively process the trauma of 9/11. The slogan of ‘Never Forget’ prescribes an unfailing remembrance, which usually chooses to focus on the American resilience that rose from the ashes in its darkest hour. However, there are also murky questions to be answered about what should be remembered about this horrific event. The 9/11 museum, a controversial idea in itself, makes little of the bureaucratic misconduct between the CIA and the FBI that allowed the attacks to happen, or how they were then used to justify an illegal war and a nationwide spike of hate crimes. This isn’t just about guilty institutions trying to evade blame, but because the whole truth makes these tragedies even harder to process.
Shoah chooses not to shy away from the uncomfortable parts of its history, and as such it made many powerful people also feel uncomfortable. The Polish Government urged France to ban the film for what was in their view, direct implications of their complicity in the genocide. Even the state of Israel, who had originally commissioned the film before withdrawing their backing, was shaken by what Lanzmann had made. The film itself is not critical of Israel, Lanzmann had in fact made a staunchly zionist film previous to Shoah. However, it was instrumental in undermining the attitudes that many Israelis held towards the Holocaust at the time. For some, the Holocaust was a story of Jewish weakness, and Israel was to be a story of Jewish strength, built on the ideal that ‘never again’ would they let such a massacre happen. They were looking for a story about how their enemy tried to crush them, and how they survived; Shoah is not that story.
Lanzmann has described the process of making Shoah as akin to looking into a ‘black circle,” something you can study for days only to come to the same desperate conclusions. Whilst many of those who contributed to the film reportedly felt a huge sense of personal meaning, knowing that the story that has haunted them for so long has finally been told, the film offers no such catharsis to its viewers. A historian interviewed later in the film says, ‘I was afraid to ask the big questions in danger I only came up with small answers.” Shoah is an exploration of the pain we feel when facing up to those small answers.
Much of the story of the Holocaust usually exists in the starkest terms: a story of utter evil and total innocence; of unimaginable despair and inspiring hope. Instead, Shoah spends much of its run time in the moral grey, acting almost like a companion piece to Hannah Arendt’s book, The Banality of Evil. A strange feeling arises upon watching ex-Nazi officers recount the working of the camps like a teacher pointing out maths equations on a blackboard, or Polish bystanders whose own anti-semitism becomes palpable in their similarly emotionless recounting of their neighbour’s demises. Eventually, our disdain for these people fades into an enveloping sense of defeat. Do these people regret what they did? Do they feel any remorse? Does any of it matter now that the damage has been so resolutely done?
Once hate for the perpetrators subsides, you are left only with grief. If nothing else, Shoah delivers on its title by demonstrating just how devastating this catastrophe was, and for that reason, it shows how traditional memorialisation is almost impossible. Over two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population was destroyed by the Nazis, resulting in not just a massive loss of human life, but a cultural eradication. There are not enough monuments to cover all the locations where the killing took place, no walls with enough space to write the names of all those who died. Shoah is as much about demanding that the stories we have live on, as it is about acknowledging that many of them are permanently lost.
Shoah is not nihilistic, but it is brutally honest, and it is in that honesty that the true power of the film is found. There is beauty in the whole truth, no matter how painful the telling of it is. And as long as we seek to avoid that pain in remembrance, we will not be truly remembering what happened, only constructing a version of it that suits the present. Shoah is a reminder that we must acknowledge the blank spaces and the things we can’t truly remember, because they also happened. Remembrance is our attempt to reach out to the past, but to truly honour it we must accept we never fully can, we are left with what remains.
