Shoah (Claude Lanzmann)

Abstract

In his film-making practice, critical writing and interviews, Claude Lanzmann has inscribed the ideals of Holocaust piety onto tablets of stone for the world of Holocaust cinema. The proscriptions are wellknown. At times, they verge on the mystic, as in the quotation already cited in the introduction to this book:

The Holocaust is unique because it created a circle of flame around itself, a boundary not to be crossed, since horror in the absolute degree cannot be communicated. To pretend that one has done so is to commit the gravest of transgressions.¹

This stern code stems from what Lanzmann regards as our innate incapacity to respond to direct representations of horror in a meaningful fashion:

If there had been — by sheer obscenity or miracle — a film actually shot in the past of three thousand people dying together in a gas chamber, first of all, I think that no one human being would have been able to look at this. Anyhow, I would have never included this in the film. I would have preferred to destroy it. It is not visible. You cannot look at this.²

In its basic rejection of fictional recreations and archival representations, Lanzmann’s epic 9.5-hour documentary Shoah has cast a commensurately long shadow over the Holocaust films that have followed it.