Rating: 7.4/10 (2,201 votes)
Runtime: USA:503 min | Sweden:544 min (25 fps) | UK:566 min
Language: English,German,Hebrew,Polish,Yiddish,French(English Sub)
Country: France
Color: Color
IMDb Link:
| Code: |
| http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090015/ |
Director: Claude Lanzmann
Cast:
Simon Srebnik ... Himself
Michael Podchlebnik ... Himself
Motke Zaidl ... Himself
Hanna Zaidl ... Herself
Jan Piwonski ... Himself
Itzhak Dugin ... Himself
Richard Glazer ... Himself
Paula Biren ... Herself
Pana Pietyra ... Herself
Pan Filipowicz ... Himself
Pan Falborski ... Himself
Abraham Bomba ... Himself
Czeslaw Borowi ... Himself
Henrik Gawkowski ... Himself
Rudolf Vrba ... Himself
Description: Shoah is a nine-hour film completed by Claude Lanzmann in 1985 about the Holocaust (or Shoah). Though Shoah is conventionally classified as a documentary film, director Lanzmann considers it to fall outside of that genre,[1] as, unlike most historical documentaries, the film does not feature reenactments or historical footage; instead it consists of interviews with people who were involved in various ways in the Holocaust, and visits to different places they discuss.
Although loosely structured, the film is concerned mainly with four topics: Chełmno, where gas vans were first used to exterminate Jews; the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau; and the Warsaw Ghetto, with testimonies from survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators.
The sections on Treblinka include testimony from Abraham Bomba, who survived as a barber, Richard Glazer, an inmate, and a rare interview with Franz Suchomel, an SS officer who worked at the camp who reveals intricate details of the camp's gas chamber. Suchomel apparently agreed to provide Lanzmann with some anonymous background details; Lanzmann instead secretly filmed his interview, with the help of assistants and a hidden camera. There is also an interesting account from Henrik Gawkowsky, who drove one of the trains while intoxicated with vodka.
Testimonies on Auschwitz are provided by Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from the camp before the end of the war, Filip M�ller, who worked in an incinerator burning the bodies from the gassings. There are also accounts from various Polish locals, who saw the trains heading daily to the camp and leaving empty; they quickly guessed the fate of those on board.
In regards to Chełmno, the only two Jews to survive are both interviewed: Simon Srebnik, who was forced to sing military songs to amuse the ***; and Mordechai Podchiebnick. There is also a secretly-filmed interview with Franz Schalling, who was a guard.
The Warsaw ghetto is discussed toward the end of the film, and the appalling conditions there are described by Jan Karski, who worked for the Polish government-in-exile, and Franz Grassler, a Nazi administrator who liaised with Jewish leaders. Memories from Jewish participants in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising conclude the documentary.
Outside the archetypes discussed below, Lanzmann also interviews Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who discusses the historical significance of Nazi propaganda against the European Jews and the Nazi invention of the Final Solution.
Though the film has generally been highly praised, some Poles have criticized Lanzmann claiming he was selective in his use of Polish subjects, that he mistranslated some dialogue, and that he edited the film to create the impression that Poles willingly co-operated with the ***, cutting out anything which contradicted this view. The late film critic Gene Siskel counted Shoah as being one of his top ten favorite films.
The complete text of the film was published in 1985.
Archetypes in Shoah
Shoah consists of roughly 9 hours of interviews with witnesses of the Holocaust. Lanzmann's style of interviewing, and his selection of interview footage divides his witnesses into three distinct archetypes: survivor, bystander and perpetrator. Lanzmann makes an effort to represent each archetype quite differently.
Survivors are those who directly experienced the persecution and horror of the Holocaust, and survived to tell their story. All of the survivors that Lanzmann interviews are Jewish. Lanzmann uses these survivors to present a historical record. Many survivors give long, detached descriptions of the events that they witnessed. For example, in Part 4, we hear Filip M�ller and Rudolf Vrba describe the liquidation of the family camp at Auschwitz. Their testimonies form an historical narrative.
Other survivors tell of their own personal experiences of the Holocaust. M�ller does not just describe the gassing of the prisoners from the family camp; he also talks about what the prisoners said to him, and describes the experience of going into the gas chamber himself. This testimony is a personal narrative. Lanzmann's survivors react emotionally to what they witnessed. M�ller breaks down as he recalls the prisoners breaking into song while being forced into the gas chamber. The camera pulls in close, to capture every detail of his distress. Lanzmann also encourages his witnesses to act out their testimony.
In Part 3 Lanzmann interviews Abraham Bomba, a barber at Auschwitz, while he cuts hair in a barber's shop. He breaks down while describing how a barber friend of his came across his wife while cutting hair outside the gas chamber. As the camera captures his anguish, Bomba's personal narrative is unspoken as well as spoken.
Bystanders are those who were present during the events of the Holocaust without directly being part of it. Some were peripherally involved while others were witnesses. All of the bystanders that Lanzmann interviews are Polish. Lanzmann procures personal narratives from these bystanders. He interviews many of them in the same way that he interviews his witnesses.
In Part 1 he takes Pan Falborski, a Polish bystander, on a train to Treblinka while we watch his reaction. Lanzmann also drives him along the streets of Wlodawa in a car while he talks about the Jews who used to live in the passing houses. In Part 2 Falborski talks about the gas vans and the mass graves. Karski returns and gives a detailed, emotional description of the ghetto.
Lanzmann interviews many bystanders in public groups. He does not ask for their names or for detailed testimony. Of many bystanders he asks what they saw or heard, and whether they knew what was going on in the death camps. His questions reveal how little anyone saw or heard. They also reveal that people knew some of what was happening, but they did nothing. In Part 2 he talks to a group of Polish women in Grabow. Under his questions, they reveal that they did not like the Jewish women who used to live in Grabow because they were rich and beautiful and did not have to work. Another bystander, a man, reveals that he is happy that the Jews are gone, but would rather they had gone to Israel voluntarily than be exterminated. In an interview outside a Catholic church, with Simon Srebnik present, he encourages bystanders to talk about the Holocaust in terms of justice for the biblical killing of Jesus by the Jews.
Perpetrators are those who were directly involved in orchestrating the Holocaust. All of the perpetrators that Lanzmann interviews are German. From these perpetrators, Lanzmann establishes a historical narrative. They give detailed, detached accounts of the workings of the Holocaust.
In Part 2, Franz Schalling describes the workings of Chełmno where he served as a security guard. In Parts 1, 2 and 3, Franz Suchomel talks about the workings of Treblinka where he was an SS officer. In Part 3, Walter Stier, a former Nazi bureaucrat, describes the workings of the railways. Sometimes their testimony becomes more personal. Schalling expresses sympathy for his Jewish victims, but Lanzmann moves him on. Lanzmann is also concerned with establishing their knowledge of the Holocaust. Many of his perpetrators assert their ignorance of what was going on. Suchomel claims that he did not know about extermination at Treblinka until he arrived there. Stier claims to have been too busy to find out that his trains were transporting Jews to their deaths. In each case, Lanzmann challenges their assertions of ignorance with relentless questions.
Some subjects fail to fit neatly into any of the these three categories, like the courier to the Polish Government in Exile, Jan Karski. Karski, a Christian, sneaks into the Warsaw ghetto and then escapes to England to try to convince the Allied governments to intervene more strongly on behalf of the Jews, but fails in doing so.
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Additional Info:
Awards for Shoah (1985)
BAFTA Awards
1987 Won Flaherty Documentary Award Claude Lanzmann
Flaherty Documentary Award (TV) Claude Lanzmann
Berlin International Film Festival
1986 Won Caligari Film Award Claude Lanzmann
FIPRESCI Prize Forum of New Cinema Claude Lanzmann
OCIC Award - Honorable Mention Claude Lanzmann
Boston Society of Film Critics Awards
986 Won BSFC Award Best Documentary
C�sar Awards, France
1986 Honorary C�sar Claude Lanzmann
International Documentary Association
1986 Won IDA Award Claude Lanzmann
Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards
1987 Won KCFCC Award Best Documentary
Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards
1985 Won Special Award Claude Lanzmann
National Society of Film Critics Awards, USA
1986 Won NSFC Award Best Documentary
New York Film Critics Circle Awards
1985 Won NYFCC Award Best Documentary
Rotterdam International Film Festival
1986 Won Rotterdam Award Best Documentary Claude Lanzmann
***************
Shoah By Roger Ebert
Nov 24, 1985
Rating:
****
For more than nine hours I sat and watched a film named "Shoah," and when it was over, I sat for a while longer and simply stared into space, trying to understand my emotions. I had seen a memory of the most debased chapter in human history. But I had also seen a film that affirmed life so passionately that I did not know where to turn with my confused feelings. There is no proper response to this film. It is an enormous fact, a 550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide. It is one of the noblest films ever made.
The film's title is a Hebrew word for chaos or annihilation - for the Holocaust. The film is a documentary, but it does not contain images from the 1940s. There are no old newsreel shots, no interviews with the survivors of the death camps, no coverage of the war crimes trials. All of the movie was photographed in the last five or six years by a man named Claude Lanzmann, who went looking for eyewitnesses to Hitler's "Final Solution." He is surprisingly successful in finding people who were there, who saw and heard what went on. Some of them, a tiny handful, are Jewish survivors of the camps. The rest are mostly old people, German and Polish, some who worked in the camps, others who were in a position to observe what happened.
They talk and talk. "Shoah" is a torrent of words, and yet the overwhelming impression, when it is over, is one of silence. Lanzmann intercuts two kinds of images. He shows the faces of his witnesses. And then he uses quiet pastoral scenes of the places where the deaths took place. Steam engines move massively through the Polish countryside, down the same tracks where trains took countless Jews, gypsies, Poles, homosexuals and other so-called undesira bles to their deaths. Cameras pan silently across pastures, while we learn that underneath the tranquility are mass graves. Sometimes the image is of a group of people, gathered in a doorway, or in front of a church, or in a restaurant kitchen.
Lanzmann is a patient interrogator. We see him in the corners of some of his shots, a tall, lanky man, informally dressed, chain-smoking. He wants to know the details. He doesn't ask large, profound questions about the meaning of the extermination of millions of people. He asks little questions. In one of the most chilling sequences in the film, he talks to Abraham Bomba, today a barber in Tel Aviv. Bomba was one of the Jewish barbers ordered to cut off the hair of Jewish women before they were killed in Treblinka. His assignment suggests the shattering question: How can a woman's hair be worth more than her life? But Lanzmann does not ask overwhelming and unanswerable questions like this. These are the sorts of questions he asks:
You cut with what? With scissors?
There were no mirrors?
You said there were about 16 barbers? You cut the hair of how many women in one batch?
The barber tries to answer. As he talks, he has a customer in his chair, and he snips at the customer's hair almost obsessively, making tiny movements with his scissors, as if trying to use the haircut as a way to avoid the questions. Their conversation finally arrives at this exchange, after he says he cannot talk any more:
A. "I can't. It's too horrible. Please."
Q. We have to do it. You know it.
A. I won't be able to do it.
Q. You have to do it. I know it's very hard. I know and I apologize.
A. Don't make me go on, please.
Q. Please. We must go on.
Lanzmann is cruel, but he is correct. He must go on. It is necessary to make this record before all of those who were witnesses to the Holocaust have died.
His methods in obtaining the interviews were sometimes underhanded. He uses a concealed television camera to record the faces of some of the old Nazi officials whom he interviews, and we look over the shoulders of the TV technicians in a van parked outside the buildings where they live. We see the old men nonchalantly pulling down charts from the wall to explain the layout of a death camp, and we hear their voices, and at one point when a Nazi asks for reassurance that the conversation is private, Lanzmann provides it. He will go to any length to obtain this testimony.
He does not, however, make any attempt to arrange his material into a chronology, an objective, factual record of how the "Final Solution" began, continued and was finally terminated by the end of the war. He uses a more poetic, mosaic approach, moving according to rhythms only he understands among the only three kinds of faces we see in this film: survivors, murderers and bystanders. As their testimony is intercut with the scenes of train tracks, steam engines, abandoned buildings and empty fields, we are left with enough time to think our own thoughts, to meditate, to wonder.
This is a long movie but not a slow one, and in its words it creates something of the same phenomenon I experienced while watching "My Dinner with Andre." The words themselves create images in the imagination, as they might in a radio play. Consider the images summoned by these words, spoken by Filip Muller, a Czech Jew assigned to work at the doors of the gas chambers, a man who survived five waves of liquidations at Auschwitz:
You see, once the gas was poured in, it worked like this: It rose from the ground upwards. And in the terrible struggle that followed - because it was a struggle - the lights were switched off in the gas chambers. It was dark, no one could see, so the strongest people tried to climb higher. Because they probably realized that the higher they got, the more air there was. They could breathe better. That caused the struggle. Secondly, most people tried to push their way to the door. It was psychological; they knew where the door was; maybe they could force their way out. It was instinctive, a death struggle. Which is why children and weaker people and the aged always wound up at the bottom. The strongest were on top. Because in the death struggle, a father didn't realize his son lay beneath him.
Q. And when the doors were opened?
A. They fell out. People fell out like blocks of stone, like rocks falling out of a truck.
The images evoked by his words are inutterably painful. What is remarkable, on reflection, is that Muller is describing an event that neither he nor anyone else now alive ever saw. I realized, at the end of his words, that a fundamental change had taken place in the way I personally visualized the gas chambers. Always before, in reading about them or hearing about them, my point of view was outside, looking in. Muller put me inside.
That is what this whole movie does, and it is probably the most important thing it does. It changes our point of view about the Holocaust. After nine hours of "Shoah," the Holocaust is no longer a subject, a chapter of history, a phenomenon. It is an environment. It is around us. Ordinary people speak in ordinary voices of days that had become ordinary to them. A railroad engineer who drove the trains to Treblinka is asked if he could hear the screams of the people in the cars behind his locomotive.
A. Obviously, since the locomotive was next to the cars. They screamed, asked for water. The screams from the cars closest to the locomotives could be heard very well.
Q. Can one get used to that?
A. No. It was extremely distressing. He knew the people behind him were human, like him. The Germans gave him and the other workers vodka to drink. Without drinking, they couldn't have done it.
Some of the strangest passages in the film are the interviews with the officials who were actually responsible for running the camps and making the "Final Solution" work smoothly and efficiently. None of them, at least by their testimony, seem to have witnessed the whole picture. They only participated in a small part of it, doing their little jobs in their little corners; if they are to be believed, they didn't personally kill anybody, they just did small portions of larger tasks, and somehow all of the tasks, when added up and completed, resulted in people dying. Here is the man who scheduled the trains that took the Jews to die:
Q. You never saw a train?
A. No, never. We had so much work, I never left my desk. We worked day and night.
And here is a man who lived 150 feet from a church where Jews were rounded up, held and then marched into gas vans for the trip to the crematoriums:
Q. Did you see the gas vans?
A. No . . . yes, from the outside. They shuttled back and forth. I never looked inside; I didn't see Jews in them.
What is so important about "Shoah" is that the voices are heard of people who did see, who did understand, who did comprehend, who were there, who know that the Holocaust happened, who tell us with their voices and with their eyes that genocide occurred in our time, in our civilization.
There is a tendency while watching "Shoah" to try to put a distance between yourself and the events on the screen. These things happened, after all, 40 or 45 years ago. Most of those now alive have been born since they happened. Then, while I was watching the film, came a chilling moment. A name flashed on the screen in the subtitles, the name of one of the commandants at Treblinka death camp. At first I thought the name was "Ebert" - my name. Then I realized it was "Eberl." I felt a moment of relief, and then a moment of intense introspection as I realized that it made no difference what the subtitle said. The message of this film (if we believe in the brotherhood of man) is that these crimes were committed by people like us, against people like us.
But there is an even deeper message as well, and it is contained in the testimony of Filip Muller, the Jew who stood at the door of a crematorium and watched as the victims walked in to die. One day some of the victims, Czech Jews, began to sing. They sang two songs: "The Hatikvah" and the Czech national anthem. They affirmed that they were Jews and that they were Czechs. They denied Hitler, who would have them be one but not the other. Muller speaks:
That was happening to my countrymen, and I realized that my life had become meaningless. (His eyes fill with tears.) Why go on living? For what? So I went into the gas chamber with them, resolved to die. With them. Suddenly, some who recognized me came up to me. . . . A small group of women approached. They looked at me and said, right there in the gas chamber . . .
Q. You were inside the gas chamber?
A. Yes. One of them said: "So you want to die. But that's senseless. Your death won't give us back our lives. That's no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us."
And that is the final message of this extraordinary film. It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness. In it, Claude Lanzmann celebrates the priceless gift that sets man apart from animals and makes us human, and gives us hope: the ability for one generation to tell the next what it has learned.
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