663 Shoah

[zedz]

I understand that Lanzmann wanted to include as much material as possible, but I can't help but wonder if Shoah would have made even more of an impact if the film was significantly shorter.

I don't think so. The length of the film is an appropriate response to the magnitude of the horror it documents.

If you want to see what a (much) shorter version of Shoah might be like, check our Marcel Lozinski's Witnesses. 1988, less than half an hour, completely and utterly devastating, and an absolute masterpiece.

[knives]

That's a beautiful film and one of the few films that I feel tackle the subject well. As it, Night and Fog, and several others show you can give the impression of the horror at any run time and I have to agree with Dom that the genuine horror of the experience (any genocidal experience really) is beyond understanding for anybody let alone through a film.

[movielocke]

hearing interview after interview does become tiresome after a while.

One of the things that gradually sunk in after about the eighth or ninth hour was just that every interview, taken together, all over the continent, everyone was affected by it, everyone was impacted, every single person has a story to communicate about it--the sheer enormity and scale is staggering in a way that a typical 90-130 minute doc could never really begin to approximate.

Which, come to think of it, is also a decent refutation to deniers, yeah, just try and maintain a conspiracy across a dozen countries, languages, and hundreds of millions of co-conspirators...

[knives]

For all my suspicions of the film(s) in this thread I am now much more optimistic it won't be a Wild 90 type flop after watch the interview with Champetier and Desplechin who frame the film in such a way as to remove it of the pretensions that Lanzmann offends me with (the article in the booklet was so offensive that if it weren't a library copy I'd throw it in the garbage). The way they frame him essentially as a child within the film turning real life into movies is a much more interesting idea than the sort of witness thing Lanzmann disgustingly suggests or the platitude filled contradictions that Kent Jones does in his insecure essay (usually I adore his work, but this essay was embarrassing). Desplechin even communicates rather beautifully one of Jones' failed ideas when he discusses how the film turns the audience into the interview subject. That said the trinity of Jews, Poles, and Germans he presents only heightens my major fear because even if we were to take Jones argument for 'European Jews' at face value it would ignore the situation that lead, for example, the French and Serbian Jews to Lanzmann's two favorite camps.

Hopefully tomorrow I can catch up with his Sobibor film as that subject is of extreme interest to me and I figure such a highly specialized topic would sit most comfortably for me as an introduction to Lanzamann's style.

[swo17]

By "witness thing," I assume you mean Lanzmann's method of eschewing the typical shocking archive footage, and instead giving the film's subjects a pulpit to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust that they lived through. Bearing witness is an important spiritual and even legal concept in the sense that the more an event is witnessed, the more difficult it becomes to deny. (Consider, for example, the scripture from Corinthians: "In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established.") What exactly do you find disgusting about this?

[ptatler]

By "witness thing," I assume you mean Lanzmann's method of eschewing the typical shocking archive footage, and instead giving the film's subjects a pulpit to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust that they lived through. Bearing witness is an important spiritual and even legal concept... What exactly do you find disgusting about this?

I'm equally confused here. What was objectionable about the Jones piece in particular? Admittedly, Lanzmann has a rather self-righteous swagger but I don't think that undermines the substance of what he's written (or, certainly, filmed).

Oddly enough, I'm arguing with someone on Facebook today about the merits of SHOAH and Lanzmann. Defending SCHINDLER'S LIST in particular, the fellow there asserted:

Some people believe that the Holocaust can't be addressed via melodrama, manipulation, etc. It can only be addressed in an abstract way as in SHOAH. I think the route of real cinema, with all its sensuality, is far superior. You will see a similar distinction this fall when a lot of highbrows praise 12 YEARS A SLAVE as the "real, serious" version of DJANGO UNCHAINED. I saw SHOAH in one day. It was like having to work a double shift stapling papers. Just an empty experience. A conceptual gesture repeating itself to oblivion. I think Claude Lanzmann views it as a great work of art. And people have been reviewing all the sort of DVD-extra type stuff he has done since as if THEY were great works of art.

I think there's a lot of bullshit in the above (and haven't the time to go through it point by point). But my general thought is that the Holocaust is such a blight on the spiritual landscape of mankind's history that it does necessitate a different sort of approach. I obviously haven't seen every Holocaust film (and I really need to watch Wadja's KORCZAK), but I can't think of a single one I've seen that conveys the absolutely hopeless moral vacuum in the way that SHOAH does.

[knives]

By "witness thing," I assume you mean Lanzmann's method of eschewing the typical shocking archive footage, and instead giving the film's subjects a pulpit to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust that they lived through. Bearing witness is an important spiritual and even legal concept in the sense that the more an event is witnessed, the more difficult it becomes to deny. (Consider, for example, the scripture from Corinthians: "In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established.") What exactly do you find disgusting about this?

No, in the essay included in the booklet Lanzmann calls Jews 'the witness people' and gives us a 'metaphysical' capability in terms of always needing to be on the business end of the punishment stick. Minor to that I also find it hilarious and wrong-headed he equates anti-zionism to anti-semitism but that's a separate issue.

[zedz]

Minor to that I also find it hilarious and wrong-headed he equates anti-zionism to anti-semitism but that's a separate issue.

That is unfortunate - and separate, and all too common - but it doesn't impinge at all on Shoah.

[knives]

Hence my saying minor to that as I imagine a genocide movie would have nothing to say on that especially in the context that Lanzmann speaks of it (essentially that the Holocaust cured anti-semitism, but that it a few years later was replaced with anti-zionism functioning identically). This necessary victimization I point to earlier though is a genuine fear of what may come up especially when Jerzy Kawalerowicz so eloquently denounced such ideas in Austeria which I consider to be the most essential work film or otherwise on the matter of the Jewish end of the Holocaust (which Lanzmann and Jones emphasize is all that is cared about in Shoah). That said The Karski Report reduces some more fears that I have as while it is not terribly great cinema (essentially being a 60 Minutes style interview) Lanzmann reduces his role in the interview tremendously which makes me hope that in the larger tapestry his opinions are irrelevant.

[Clodius]

I've just started volunteering at a local Holocaust museum, and in doing so figured I should pick this up and watch it (especially considering the B&N sale). I've got it now, my question to you who have watched it... will it lose any of it's power etc if I break it up over multiple days? It can be hard to find a spare 9 hours, is this something that should truly be watched whole, or could I watch parts nightly?

[knives]

I suppose that begs the larger question of if it has any power and if so what kind. Questions of quality aside the film is set up in a way where it can be watched over two nights if you don't have the time for the full sitting.

[colinr0380]

I agree with knives, as I remember that the times that the BBC showed it on television they broke it up into the two 'eras' over two consecutive nights each of four and a bit hours.

[ptatler]

I had to split it up over four nights myself. None of the impact was lost. If anything, the rumination time in between helps process it. I'm still processing it four months later.

[essrog]

Does anyone have thoughts on which segment or segments might make a good pairing with Wiesel's Night for a sophomore English class? Or, since the nine-plus hour running time is part of the point, does showing one segment over a 50-minute class period not make any sense?

[matrixschmatrix]

Would showing Night and Fog make more sense? It would certainly fit your schedule better.

[knives]

Either that or one of the shorter fillms in the set would be better to segment (that said I'd go with Resnais on principal).

[Sam T.]

I once taught Night and Fog as part of a writing class for college freshman, and though nobody complained I've never felt completely sure that a film with such graphic visual imagery was a useful teaching tool. It was hard for any of us to concentrate on or discuss anything beyond the three or four most upsetting images.

I find the sections with Filip Muller in Shoah to be both powerful and informative. I read Night decades ago, and I don't remember what specific camps it deals with, but Muller's descriptions of Auschwitz, particularly his first appearance in the film (which deals with crematorium 1, a building Lanzman was able to film) would be useful for young readers who want to be able to picture the events of the book more vividly as they read.

[matrixschmatrix]

Really? I mean, there's no question that Night and Fog is almost overwhelmingly hard to look at, but it's a surprisingly dense work for such a short film, with an immense number of connections and implications that those supremely powerful images bring forth. Besides, if one isn't forced to look at such things, they're that much easier to ignore- and school certainly seems like the right place to show it, particularly in the context of Night.

Resnais's great triumph, to me, is that he shows you the really dehumanizing cruelty of the camps (though he actually spends less time on such footage than one might think from remembering it) while also refusing to allow the viewer to distance themselves from the humanity of the victims, to allow them to become mere bodies upon which harm was inflicted. That's surely in Shoah too, but Resnais also goes out of his way to connect that paradox- fully human people treated as something other than human- to the larger world, in a way that seems to me as though it would provide much more fruitful discussion than any specific section I can recall in Shoah, particularly in connection to Wiesel.

[Sam T.]

I don't disagree with any of what you said. I think very highly of both films, and my thinking when I put Night and Fog on the syllabus was pretty much as you describe it - the film is important, intellectually and ethically sound, and worth talking about. I was not teaching it along side Night (which, as I said, I read only once in, probably, 1988) but as part of a unit on "political films," which seemed to be a good context to discuss both the history to which the film tries to bear witness and the formal strategies it employs.

I'm still not exactly sure what went wrong. I know that, as I rewatched the film the night before class, and was reminded how upsetting it is, I started to feel like requiring people to watch it (which had initially seemed like a good idea for all the reasons you outline) started to seem really scary. Had I done enough to prepare people for what they were going to see? Did I actually have something to say about the film that was smart enough to warrant ruining a bunch of eighteen-year-olds' evenings?

I don't know if it was because I felt uncomfortable teaching a film I wasn't sure my students could handle, or if it was because people were in shock from having watched it, but it was very difficult to talk about any of the issues Night and Fog addresses. People were sad and quiet, and they seemed to need to process what they'd seen on their own. Or maybe they'd been so upset by it that they just wanted to stop thinking about it entirely. Whatever the reason, people were not able to talk that day about what they'd seen, and I concluded that, while the film is worth watching, it did not work as a way to prompt a discussion in that particular class.

A different person teaching a different class may have a *significantly* different experience with Night and Fog. But essrog asked about Shoah specifically, and I wanted to answer that question because nobody had, and because my own experience teaching N&F, for whatever it's worth, was not a good one.

[FerdinandGriffon]

People were sad and quiet, and they seemed to need to process what they'd seen on their own.

Sam T., though I'm sure you have your own particular prerogatives and goals for that class, I think that provoking this kind of reflection is potentially as useful, if not more so, than any kind of discussion you could have. I guess it's a choice between an active dialogue (and you playing your role of teacher more actively and traditionally) and the students being exposed to and feeling something profound that they might not experience otherwise. Personally, I'd assert the importance of the latter as a necessary complement to discussion. Obviously you can't and shouldn't play Night and Fog every class, but I imagine it would strengthen dialogue and thought in the long run if they were moved to silence on occasion.

[zedz]

People were sad and quiet, and they seemed to need to process what they'd seen on their own.

Sam T., though I'm sure you have your own particular prerogatives and goals for that class, I think that provoking this kind of reflection is potentially as useful, if not more so, than any kind of discussion you could have. I guess it's a choice between an active dialogue (and you playing your role of teacher more actively and traditionally) and the students being exposed to and feeling something profound that they might not experience otherwise. Personally, I'd assert the importance of the latter as a necessary complement to discussion. Obviously you can't and shouldn't play Night and Fog every class, but I imagine it would strengthen dialogue and thought in the long run if they were moved to silence on occasion.

And if it's an option, it might be useful to leave only a small time for discussion immediately after the film and follow up in the next class when they've had time to process it.

[Sam T.]

I think what it comes down to for me is that not every film that everyone should see is a film that anyone should be forced to see, or should be expected to see under circumstances they didn't choose. Part of respecting the power of something like Night and Fog (or, in a different way, say, Realm of the Senses) is recognizing that the images they show us can actually be dangerous. I assume, obviously, that I should be allowed to decide for myself if I want to see Night and Fog, In the Realm of the Senses, Salo, or what have you. I think in requiring Night and Fog for a class I was failing to accord my students the same freedom of choice.

In a class on WWII, or on violence in cinema, where students had in a sense signaled their willingness to think about this issues by registering for the class, I would probably feel much differently.

There's nothing at all wrong with quiet reflection, and I have no particular attachment to traditional classroom dynamics, but one of the peculiar things about freshman composition is that, for most students, it is the only class they have that semester which is small enough to be run as a seminar. It's important that students get a chance to discuss ideas with one another, and ideally they will have a real conversation among themselves every class, and the instructor will fade into the background. If class turns into either a lecture or a group meditation then it isn't doing what it's supposed to, since the assumption is that students get enough of both those things elsewhere.

Part of Shoah's project is to displace the work of representing the horror of violence from pictures to words. Verbal descriptions of violence and war are joined to images of the pastoral and ordinary. This means that long stretches of it are easy to watch, even if there are occasional shocks and even if watching the whole thing in one sitting has deliberately been made difficult. If this ease makes it more teachable than Night and Fog in other people's classroom I don't know, but it would have made it more teachable in mine, and if I were designing the assignment again I would probably give people a choice between Night and Fog and perhaps a third of Shoah.

[essrog]

Thanks to everyone for their ideas and conversation. I certainly did consider Night and Fog, but remembered showing it to high school seniors several years ago, and they responded similarly to Sam T.'s. While not an out-and-out disaster, it was enough to make me think twice about showing it to sophomores.

So I ended up showing about the first hour or so of Shoah over two days, and had kids respond in writing and some discussion to a few quotes in the Kent Jones essay -- Lanzmann's statement that "the subject of the film would be death itself, death rather than survival," and Emil Fackenheim's explanation of that as "the presence of an absence." We did a little compare/contrast with Night, too. It went OK. Several students were able to make the Fackenheim quote connect to the slow panning shots of the mass grave sites, the camera slowly approaching the Auschwitz gate, etc. And a few also noted how none of the interview subjects talked (or were asked) about how they survived -- it was about the death they saw around them. One student did ask about the existence of historical footage of the camps, and I told them about my back-and-forth over showing Night and Fog. Many seemed eager to see something like that, but I couldn't help thinking about the looks on my seniors' faces when I showed it to them, and thought, "No, you really don't." Not that they SHOULDN'T see something like that, but they just seemed a little too ... enthusiastic or something.

[Gregory]

This suggestion would have been much more helpful if I'd seen this discussion and contributed a couple of weeks ago, but if I were going to pick a Holocaust documentary for students I'd probably show most or all of Lodz Ghetto. It's a much more conventional documentary than Shoah or Night and Fog, and very well done, with a lot of gripping photos, period footage, artwork, first-person accounts acted out in voiceover, and historical detail that give a powerful inkling of what it was like to live under Nazi occupation.

[djproject]

In college, I took a seminar course called "The Holocaust in German Literature and Film" (spring 2002 and it was freshman year at the College of William & Mary). We did watch an excerpt from Shoah and it was the beginning of Era 2, Part 1 and particularly Frank Suchomel's, Abraham Bomba's (and yes, the infamous haircut whilst talking about cutting hair) and I believe some of Filip Muller's where he's describing the Auschwitz gas chambers.

Personally, I definitely remember being a bit unnerved when you have the descriptions of the camps overlaid on the contemporaneous footage of the actual locations. In the midst of systematic death, grass and trees grow and birds chirp. Nature and life goes on even in those places of death. It could either indicate an overall cosmic indifference or a sign that life triumphs over death. Either way, it was a striking association when I saw it that first time.

When I finally got to see the entire thing for myself, the next thing that unnerved me was the Raul Hilberg interview where he describes the transport document. On the surface, it was a mundane document showing a time table and travel itinerary. Yet this was the transport that would carry Jews on a regular train route to Treblinka. Later on, he talks about how the Reich travel bureau who handled the export of the Corfu Jews was the same agency that handled any others travel arrangements Reich citizens needed. In other words, there was a parallel running underneath the normal state machinery that did what it did. This was not "foaming at the mouth" evil ... it was "business as usual".