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Reuters
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Reuters
Berlinale documentary revamps classic Holocaust film 'Shoah' for new generation
BERLIN, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Forty years after the release of French director Claude Lanzmann's seminal work "Shoah", a new documentary at the Berlin Film Festival aims to make the nine-hour-plus opus about the Holocaust relevant for a new generation. "All I Had Was Nothingness," by director Guillaume Ribot, wades through hundreds of hours of unreleased footage from the original filming to turn the focus on Lanzmann and his years-long quest to create "Shoah". Lanzmann, who died in July 2018 at the age of 92, had started working on an oral history of the Holocaust in the mid-1970s, conducting a mass of interviews with survivors, perpetrators and witnesses to the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis. In all he spent 11 years making "Shoah", the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, which was released in 1985. "We have to keep making films. We have to keep talking about this," Ribot told Reuters when asked about Holocaust remembrance. Ribot, who has worked on several documentaries about the Holocaust, added that he wanted his new film to appeal in particular to young people who may not be familiar with "Shoah". "The way I've written my film, in the form of a police investigation, a road movie, a man at work, shows that with intelligence, perseverance and this mad desire to make cinema, you can pass it on," he said. The documentary gives intimate glimpses of the making of "Shoah," such as a shirtless Lanzmann being fitted for a hidden microphone or being chastised by nosy German neighbours. Ribot narrates the film with excerpts from Lanzmann's memoir "The Patagonian Hare," recounting his ongoing struggles with funding, the project's purpose and fruitless interview attempts. "'Shoah' is a film from the pre-digital era. Everything was expensive, everything was difficult," said Ribot. "That, along with Claude Lanzmann's courage and stubbornness, had a huge influence on the film," he added. Lanzmann used hidden microphones and cameras to record interviews without consent and even concocted a fake identity to mask his Jewish surname in order to coax unwilling subjects who had worked at the death camps into agreeing to speak to him. Such practices are considered unethical for journalists. Lanzmann "always said that he makes cinema. In fact, he refused to be categorized as a documentarian," said Ribot. "Today, how do whistle-blowers do it? They don't ask for the opinion of people in big companies, etc, to do the Panama Papers and other things. They just go out and do things, and try to get at the truth," said Ribot. "Lanzmann made some great films, but he brought out the truth through the words of witnesses, victims and killers."
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The most important thing was getting to the truth': how Claude Lanzmann broke all the rules to create Shoah
Forty years after its release, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) is regarded not just as one of the greatest documentaries ever made, but a film that had to be made in order to shake the world into engaging with its still recent trauma. A new documentary, however, shows how the French director's seminal 'fiction of the real' was almost never completed. In preparation for All I Had Was Nothingness, which premiered this week at the Berlin film festival, French director Guillaume Ribot revisited the entire 220 hours of raw footage that Lanzmann filmed between 1976-81, before he then edited it down into the nine-and-a-half hour film released in cinemas. The outtakes reveal unseen insecurities and self-doubt on behalf of an auteur famed for his subsequent grandeur, all while coupled with an earth-shattering persistence and determination. It also frames Shoah as a classic case study of how the rules of journalistic ethics must sometimes be bent to expose the truth. During the filming, Lanzmann, who died in 2018, was frustrated in several attempts to doorstep Nazi criminals such as Gustav Laabs, a driver of 'gas vans' at the Chelmno concentration camp, north of the Polish city of Łódź. Prisoners at the camp were ushered into and then locked inside these mobile gas chambers before the vehicle's exhaust pipe was connected to the interior of the van via a flexible hose. Drivers like Laabs then pressed the accelerator and let the engine run 'for 10 to 15 minutes'. Footage discarded by Lanzmann during Shoah's four-year editing process show Laabs refusing to open his door to the film-maker and his crew, most likely because his neighbours had tipped him off about their arrival. 'We are not at all interested,' one German man living in the same apartment building tells the director when informed that Laabs killed 200,000 Jews, adding: 'What we don't know doesn't interest me at all.' Lanzmann mutters to himself in disgust as he walks away: 'Mass complicity, truly.' It was at this point Lanzmann decided he had to use subterfuge to get the Nazi criminals to open their doors. 'He had to find a way to trick the tricksters, so to speak,' says Ribot. Realising his surname would immediately give away his Jewish heritage, Lanzmann used a fake passport with the name Claude-Marie Sorel. For his cover story, he gave himself a made-up PhD and set up the fictional Centre for the Story of Contemporary History, telling Nazi criminals he wanted to speak to them for a research project. He loosened up his interviewees with lavish meals, paid them a fee (schmerzensgeld, or 'damages', as one war criminal calls it with unknowing irony), and repeatedly promised that he would not divulge their identities in his film. Unbeknown to the former German officers, he filmed their conversations via a small cylindrical camera hidden in the handbag of his translator, transmitting the footage to a van with recording equipment parked outside. On one occasion, his cover was blown. During an interview with Heinz Schubert, an SS officer who oversaw a massacre of Jewish prisoners in the Crimean town of Simferopol, the war criminal's wife checks on the van outside and notices the moving antenna. The camera cuts out, but a ghostly audio track documents the subsequent confrontation. 'You've played a dirty trick on us,' Schubert's relatives accuse Lanzmann, before bundling him out of their apartment. Shoah's use of subterfuge was debated after the film's release in 1985, and again upon the publication of Lanzmann's memoir The Patagonian Hare in 2009 (passages from which Ribot reads out to provide his film's sole voiceover). The consensus at the time was that bending the rules of journalistic ethics was justified given the enormity of the crimes carried out by these men, and because the evidence against was not merely prima facie but had been accepted at the Nuremberg trials. Forty years after Shoah's release, Ribot says that consensus still holds. 'I do agree with these methods, because the most important thing for Lanzmann, for me, is the possibility of getting to the truth, no matter what the methods that you need to use in order to do so,' he says. 'Nowadays, in the era of the smartphone, not only whistleblowers but all of us would use such a recording to denounce or to expose the situation, and nobody would criticise us for doing so,' he adds. What had surprised him over the three months he spent watching Lanzmann's original footage, Ribot says, was how much doubt the director had about the shape and purpose of his career-defining work. Fellow director and former friend Max Ophüls famously called him a 'megalomaniac', but in the first years of filming Lanzmann often seemed uncertain of what he wanted to do. Originally commissioned by Israel's foreign ministry as a two-hour film, officials withdrew funding after a few years out of frustration with Lanzmann's slowness. A pitch for financial support in front of the American Jewish Committee, the director admits in his memoirs, were a 'total failure' because he couldn't sum up what the message of his film would be. 'If I'd said, 'never again', or 'love one another', wallets would have sprung open. But I was a lousy fundraiser.' Not a single US dollar financed the making of Shoah. In the end, All I Had Was Nothingness at least hints that it was the continued rejections and the undiluted antisemitism Lanzmann experienced at the hands of his interviewees that spurred on and shaped his masterpiece. In one scene that ended up on the cutting-room floor, a Polish peasant casually explains the local populace's attitude to the atrocities that happened around them: that the mass-killing of Jews was an expiation for the crucifixion of Jesus. 'It's an element that is deeply rooted in the popular culture, adding to a feeling of relativity about what has happened,' says Ribot. 'It implies a religious justification, that the Jews somehow deserved what they got.'
New York Times
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Watching ‘Shoah' in Berlin, 80 Years After Auschwitz
On the first Sunday of this year's Berlin International Film Festival, Claude Lanzmann's 'Shoah' (1985) — a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Holocaust — screened to a nearly full house in the auditorium of the city's Academy of Arts. Tricia Tuttle, the festival's new director, spoke before the film, along with a curator from Berlin's Jewish Museum and Dominique Petithory-Lanzmann, the director's widow. Tuttle called the screening a 'triple remembrance': This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the 40th anniversary of 'Shoah,' and the centenary birthday of Lanzmann himself, who died in 2018. The mood was reverential. 'Shoah' — which consists of interviews with Holocaust survivors, bystanders and perpetrators, as well as footage of the sites referenced by the speakers, such as the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps — is widely considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time. Its monumental length is key to its power; it suspends viewers in the act of witnessing humanity's capacity for evil and its astonishing resilience, which we see washed across the subjects' faces as they tell their stories. There's no denying Lanzmann's achievements or the significance of 'Shoah,' yet the festival's commemorative programming — which also includes the world premiere of 'All I Had Was Nothingness,' a documentary by Guillaume Ribot that pays homage to 'Shoah' — also plays out amid growing concerns that Germany's culture of Holocaust remembrance is stifling the free speech of other artists. Last year, the film festival, known here as the Berlinale, came under fire after filmmakers participating in the event (including the directors of 'No Other Land,' a documentary currently nominated for an Oscar) were denounced by German officials and festival executives for making statements in solidarity with Palestinians. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
