Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann) (Patreon)

61/100

A film I'd been dreading for decades, simply because nine-plus hours of Holocaust testimony—however moving the individual accounts might be—sounds like an ordeal. Over those years, I saw a couple of the subsequent features that Lanzmann created from leftover Shoah footage (Sobibor, The Last of the Unjust), neither of which made me any more eager to tackle the main event. Shoah itself, however, turns out to be too much of a very good thing, with “flaws” (among which I'd include its extreme length) that are largely attributable to competing priorities. Imagine a continuum with artistic optimization at one end and historical optimization at the other. Lanzmann sensibly chose a spot toward the middle (albeit with no concession whatsoever to commercial optimization), crafting an honest-to-goodness film—way more aesthetically powerful than I'd anticipated—that runs a small eternity mostly because anything less monumental seemed irresponsible. That I choose to hang out over at the artistic extreme is arguably my problem; in any case, understand that I'm addressing Shoah from that perspective, divorced from the film's separate and immeasurable value as a repository of witness testimony. (Spielberg facilitated thousands of interviews with Holocaust survivors shortly after he made Schindler's List, but stringing all of those interviews together into a single epic documentary wouldn't necessarily produce a cinematic masterpiece.) Assigning a numerical rating seems even sillier than usual.

Having endured sizable chunks of Wang Bing's Dead Souls and Fengming, I expected and feared something similarly stripped-down: Set the camera up a few feet from your subject, seated on a chair or a couch, and just let it roll as they recount their experiences in suffocating detail. There's some of that here, and it's occasionally very effective; one in-depth, close-up reminiscence—that of Jan Karski, courier to the Polish government in exile—thrums with more anguish than you'd think would still be possible 35 years after the fact (and this wasn't even a survivor—just someone who visited the Warsaw ghetto; I should probably watch Lanzmann's mini-feature The Karski Report, which appears to be a stand-alone extension). Frequently, though, Lanzmann accompanies people's voices with what were then present-day shots of the locations where these atrocities took place, transforming the "city symphony" approach into a chilling dirge. Knowing that the buildings are to some degree reconstructed in no way lessens the terrible awe of touring them as somebody describes what they witnessed or underwent there, and Lanzmann's exacting, dispassionate camera allows for a deeply personal reaction that I imagine is related to yet distinct from what one might feel when visiting the same sites in person (which I haven't done). At other times, Lanzmann takes the subject to the location, asking them to confirm that what they've spoken of occurred on this very spot. And rarely does he stick with any given subject for a daunting amount of time, instead assembling a mosaic from multiple shards of recollection. I can readily imagine a four-hour cut of Shoah that I might "love" (by which I mean consider great but never want to sit through again).

At 9½ hours, however, it eventually gets exhausting, even a bit numbing. Would that be alleviated in a series format, with the same material divided (and extensively re-edited) into nine or ten episodes? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly that's how I'd expect to encounter an epic project like this one today (even if O.J.: Made in America  did also get released as a film). Lanzmann divides Shoah into two roughly equal "eras," but that feels mostly like an excuse for an intermission, not an actual organizing principle; if there's a significant difference between the halves, it escaped me entirely. Nor does the film seem to me well served by Lanzmann's effort to assimilate the testimony of Jewish victims, Nazi perpetrators (filmed covertly, in a justifiable but nonetheless fascinating breach of ostensible documentary ethics; lying to former SS officers isn't the same thing as lying to us, but still) and Polish gentiles (who are often casually, unconsciously anti-Semitic even as they profess to have been horrified by what the Nazis did). Yes, it's impossible to understand the Holocaust without including all of those perspectives...but I submit that attempting to explicate the Holocaust in a single film—even one that takes almost half a day to watch—is fundamentally quixotic. Makes perfect sense from a scholarly standpoint, but that's not how I approach movies (which is why a terrific teaching instrument like Ava DuVernay's 13th got a 35 rating from me—I already knew most of the information it presents, so I was bored). Even Lanzmann's decision to subtitle the translations of languages he doesn't speak ultimately serves the cause of history, preserving every aspect of the interview at the expense of our emotional investment in his subjects' stories. (Mentally projecting words back onto facial expressions and vocal intonations from a minute earlier, while simultaneously ignoring the voice that you're hearing right now, demands an extra level of cognition that inevitably gets in the way of an experience that's already mediated by translation to begin with. If you've ever tried to watch a movie in which the subtitles were way out of sync with the dialogue, that's more or less how big chunks of Shoah play, especially when Lanzmann keeps the translator off-camera. It's no coincidence that Karski—to my mind the most compelling interview subject by far—opts to speak in heavily accented English.) As is the case with many of my romantic relationships—just to end this on a thoroughly inappropriate analogy—I'm glad that Shoah came into my life, but not as glad as I am that Shoah is over.