Two significant events took place earlier this week at the 75th Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival: Claude Lanzmann’s iconic, ground-breaking documentary, Shoah, was screened in its entirety, to mark the 40th anniversary of its first Berlinale showing, and a documentary about the making of Shoah, called All I Had Was Nothingness by Guillame Ribot, had its premiere.
Both events had special resonance in a time when there has been a resurgence of antisemitism around the globe, and when Jewish hostages held by Hamas for nearly 500 days were released, emaciated and looking much like Holocaust victims, a little over a week before these screenings.
At the Shoah screening, a mostly German audience, many of whom were in their 20s and 30s, watched the film in silence. Most stayed for the film’s full nine hours, although in the most disturbing moments, there were walkouts, which was to be expected.
Tricia Tuttle, the director of the Berlinale, spoke before the Shoah screening, noting that this year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, as well as the centenary of Lanzmann’s birth.
“It’s an absolute honor to be able to present the entire film today, it’s also so wonderful for all of us to see a sold-out screening today of a special, special film.”
Calling it a “ground-breaking work that revolutionized the representation of the Holocaust and still feels very urgent and relevant today,” she recalled that the film had been shown for the second time at the Berlinale in 2013, when Lanzmann received an honorary Golden Bear, the festival’s highest honor.
Florian Weghorn, Tuttle’s chief of staff, introduced two guests at the screening, Dominique Lanzmann, Claude’s widow, and Tamar Lewinsky, a curator at the Jewish Museum Berlin.
Lewinsky spoke of how, after Lanzmann was commissioned to make Shoah by the Israeli Foreign Ministry (which later dropped out of the project), he spent the years from 1973-1978 in preparation for filming the movie. She emphasized that he spoke not only to dozens of survivors, but also to bystanders, mainly Poles living in the countryside near the concentration camps and death camps, and to Nazi perpetrators as well, which was a break with how the Holocaust had been documented previously.
Dominique Lanzmann recently donated 220 hours of audio archival material to the Jewish Museum Berlin, and the audio archive will be the subject of an exhibit there in late November.
A film about memory and time
Lewinsky played an excerpt in which Lanzmann spoke to Jacob Urban and his wife, Pauline, about the film Shoah in 1976 in Los Angeles. Asked whether it was “a little late in the game” to make such a film, Lanzmann replied, “I will make a very special kind of documentary… It is a film about memory and time.” If he didn’t make the film as soon as possible, he said, it would be too late because so many involved would have died. Asked whether he thought such a film could be a success, he said, “That’s not the purpose.”
A statement Lanzmann made when he received the Golden Bear in 2013 was read, in which he spoke about how much the honor meant to him and how he thought the movie would be a “liberating film for Germans,” which would allow many of them to speak for the first time about what they did and saw during the Holocaust, a statement that was greeted by thunderous applause at Sunday’s screening.
Weghorn read a quote from a speech by Ulrich Gregor, the founder and former director of the Forum Section of the Berlinale, which first screened Shoah, at the 2013 prize ceremony, in which Gregor said, “I do not hesitate to say that Shoah was the greatest event in the history of our festival, the Forum of the Berlinale, maybe also the greatest event of the Berlinale itself.”
Following the introductions, the film was shown, and its impact has not dimmed a bit since it was first released. If anything, it has sharpened with time, and the emphasis on the words of those who lived through the Holocaust made their testimonies more vivid than any archival footage could have. In archival photos and films, with piles of dead bodies and skeletal survivors, we perceive those people as victims, as statistics. But as each interviewee in Shoah opens up in his or her unique way for Lanzmann’s questions and his camera, their humanity floods the screen, making the tragedy of what they went through more disturbing.
What you will remember from the film most intensely are the people, among them Simon Srebnik, one of two survivors of the Chelmno extermination camp, where 400,000 Jews were murdered and where gas vans were first used, who was forced to sing popular songs to entertain the Germans; and Abraham Bomba, a barber who had to cut women’s hair in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp and who was filmed cutting a man’s hair in a Tel Aviv barber shop.
No less memorable are the voices of local Poles, who knew exactly what was going on, and in some cases, drove the trains that carried Jews to their deaths, and the Nazis who remember in detail every aspect of the death machine.
All I Had Was Nothingness by Guillame Ribot is an essential companion piece to Shoah, and details Lanzmann’s battle to make the film. Filmed in a similarly naturalistic style as the original documentary, Ribot uses Lanzmann’s own words, from his audio recordings and his journals (which are read by Ribot himself), to chronicle Shoah’s 12-year journey to the screen, as well as outtakes from the film.
This documentary is a kind of road movie and follows Lanzmann through many different roads: in Germany, Poland, Israel, and the US. “Making Shoah was a long and difficult battle,” Lanzmann says. “I wanted to film, but all I had was nothingness. The subject of Shoah is death itself… On some evenings, it seemed like senseless suffering and I was ready to give up. But during those 12 years of work, I always forced myself to stare relentlessly into the black sun of the Shoah.”
REALIZING THAT the subject of the film would be “death itself and not survival,” he probed the memories of his interviewees. But his emphasis on the details of the horrors did not sit well, apparently, with the Israeli officials who first commissioned the film, nor with American Jewish organizations.
“Not one American dollar funded Shoah,” he recalls, noting that if the film’s message had been, “Never again, or love one another,” he might have had an easier time getting it financed. “I was a lousy fundraiser,” he comments.
Lanzmann describes himself feeling “like a police detective on a relentless path,” and All I Had Was Nothingness reveals in detail how Lanzmann surreptitiously filmed Nazis, through a hidden video camera, even wearing a wire in some interviews. Realizing that Germans recognized his last name as Jewish, he used a gentile-sounding name to fool them into complying with him and falsely promised to conceal their identities.
Another fascinating chapter is his search for Abraham Bomba, whom he heard about in New York and whom he initially found by going from salon to salon in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. After their initial contact, Bomba disappeared, yet even in those pre-digital days, Lanzmann somehow managed to track him to Israel. But the barber was having difficulty telling his story in a regular sit-down interview and Lanzmann came up with the idea of filming him at work in a barber shop, one of the original film’s most famous moments, which helped him open up.
Asked what it was like for him to cut women’s hair after the war, following the years he spent cutting hair inside the gas chambers, Bomba says, “That is a real good question, because when I came out of the extermination camp in Treblinka and I went to work in a barber shop, and when a woman was sitting at the chair, and dressed, it was funny for me because I was [used to] cutting the hair for so many hundreds and hundreds of women, all naked.”
Lanzmann says he chose to focus on those who were on the work details in the death camps, such as Bomba, or the Sonderkommando who disposed of the bodies, because they were the last to see the victims alive and the first to see them dead.
At the end of this moving film, Lanzmann says: “I’ve always been haunted by all those people who died alone, abandoned by everyone. I wanted to make this film to resurrect them, and kill them a second time, so that we could die with them, and they wouldn’t die alone.”
Lanzmann certainly achieved that, bringing us as close as humanly possible to the victims in their last moments in Shoah. Ribot’s film shows us how he managed this feat, giving another layer of meaning to the original documentary.
