Film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann,

¶ … Film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, 1986

Deciding not to use cold archive footage French filmmaker and professor of documentary Claude Lanzmann bewildered with his 9 1/2 documentary "Shoah" (shoah or Ha Shoah, is literally denoting a catastrophic upheaval, and is the Hebrew term of the Holocaust; according to Wikipedia free encyclopedia). The director completed this documentary in 1985, and in his film he chose to use real people who were involved in different ways in the Holocaust, and also takes the viewer in various places they discuss.

Shoah consists of many hours of interviews with three categories of characters: survivors, witnesses, perpetrators. In order to depict the historical reality the director takes the survivors back to the places where their story happened. He makes them face the places where the terror took place. The particular medium of the documentary film work describes the historical reality of the holocaust through people who lived "shoah," history is told by the people who survived, witnessed or people who were directly involved in conducting the holocaust.

For Claude Lanzmann historical reality of the holocaust means people who outlived history and places where history took place. The visual backdrop to the interviews with witnesses consists mostly of talking heads completed with footage of the abandoned sites where atrocities occurred. The overall is revealing.

There are four places witch concerned the director: Chelmno, Treblinka, Auschwitz - Birkenau and Warsaw ghetto.

The documentary starts with the testimony of Simon Strebnik, in regards to Chelmno. The man utters "I can't believe I am here." While he walks the grounds that once served as his prison, and remembering the details of the camp, one can only imagine of the impact that Simon's ordeal has had on his mindset. Simon was forced to sing military songs in order to entertain the Nazis.

Abraham Bomba was a barber who survived the death camps of Treblinka. He told the horrifying story how he shaved the heads of his wife, his best friend and his best friend's wife prior to their being gassed.

The testimonies on Auschwitz are given by Rudolf Vrba, he escaped from the camp before the end of the war, Muller, who worked in an incinerator burning the bodies from the gassings and Richard Glazer. Muller describes the terror of going into the gas chambers himself.

At the end of the film there are details about the Warsaw ghetto from a man that used to work for the Polish government in-exile, and a Nazi administrator. Warsaw uprising concludes the hole documentary.

On the other side are the perpetrators. The director obtains a rare interview with SS officer Franz Suchoml, and he gives valuable details on the camp's gas chambers. This is an interview filmed with a hidden camera like the one with Nazis guard Franz Schalling.

From the bystanders Lanzmann wanted to know whether or not they new anything about the trains coming and leaving and about the death camps. In order to do this he interviewed only polish people, he even takes on a train to Treblinka Pan Falborski.

The testimonies seem like a book, they can be read. There are aspects the medium of this documentary can express more effectively than a written text. The survivors react emotionally to what they witnessed. Muller breaks down as he recalls the prisoners breaking into song while they are forced into the gas chamber. The camera, as it pulls near, captures his anguish. The film, in this case the image of the survivor or of the perpetrator, is more effectively in describing the holocaust reality than a written text because the face of the man is on the screen, his distress is very clear, thus somehow the reality of the holocaust becomes vivid.

Lanzmann allows this film to be read like a book. Books might be considered to be more powerful storytelling mediums than movies for the simple fact that we use our imagination to paint the pictures. So the director understood this, and he allows the audience to create the picture, to see it on their minds. No photos or re-enactment can fully recreate the emotions and the pain the Jewish victims had endured, he simply interviewed the subjects allowing us to create an image of their story in our minds. By using close up shots the emotions of the character are intensified.

Questions are put with as much sensitivity as possible, but the survivor's testimonies became very personal, making the viewer uncomfortable to watch the documentary any further. The characters give complex answers, very detailed, and it seems very disturbing seeing exactly into their minds.

For any documentary viewers take in consideration the objectivity of the film. Lanzmann doesn't quite succeed in making his movie objective. During the interviews with the guards of the camps he become aggressive and often interrupts what they are telling. They ask for their faces not to be revealed and the director doesn't respect their wish, and second he uses hidden cameras. The guilt of these guards is plain to see, but it seems like Lanzmann is interested in telling them what to feel, instead of letting them speak. For a documentary director, sneaking cameras in order to obtain information is not ethically correct; it has nothing to do with deontology.

The multiplicity point-of-views painted somehow a correct opinion about the holocaust. The audience is satisfied after the documentary knowing so much about shoah, that they lived the stories of the witnesses, of the bystanders and of the perpetrators. And besides the archetypes discussed Lanzmann took some interviews with holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who discusses the historical significance of Nazi propaganda against the European Jews and the Nazi invention of the Final Solution.

Lanzmann, as the film creator, expressed his own perspective on the events discussed by choosing only polish bystanders, and by hiding the camera in order to obtain the information he desired. According to Wikipedia, free encyclopedia, "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 Nazis, cutting out anything which contradicted this view."

His style of interviewing by asking for the most horrifying details is effective at adding up these details to give a horrifying portrait of the events of Nazi genocide. Lanzmann lets some of his subjects themselves show that the anti-Semitism that caused 6 million Jews to die in the Holocaust is still alive in the minds of the people that still live in Germany, Poland and elsewhere.

The interviews with the bystanders demonstrated that people knew what was happening but did nothing. Talking to a group of polish women in Grabow, the director found out that the women did not like the Jewesses that used to live there, because they were beautiful and rich. A polish man reveals that he is glad that the Jews are out of the picture but he would have preferred they had gone to Israel of their own will.

Unlike most historical documents, Lanzmann's "Shoah" does not include reenactments or terrifying photos. His film opens like a book, using a white text on a black background to situate the viewers into the documentation. The whole film allows the audience to form a personal mental picture by forcing their unique imaginations.

People were used to see all the dark films and photos about the holocaust, and the director was sure that using again all that would not impress once more, he needed to be original. Bringing in his movie real survivors to talk about the reality of the holocaust was much more powerful than any other archive footage. He put people face-to-face with the "demon," a direct contact with people who experienced the terror of the holocaust.

No doubt the director knew what he was doing, because the effect on the viewer was real, the film made people squirm in their seats. Everybody felt the character's emotions, and lived their stories while they were showing the places were the extermination happened.

Lanzmann didn't want photographs or film clips about the extermination, he went straight to the people who lived that video clips and were in those pictures that we are so amazed of today. He is certain that they are the only ones who can transmit what he wanted people to know about "shoah." Due to his first - hand style, viewers witnessed a brilliant representation of what happened during the holocaust.

Certainly photos or film clips would have diminished the power the movie had on everybody that saw "Shoah." Lamzmann's production choices lead to the creation of one of the most powerful documentary productions in history. It is a real film, about real tragedy, real events and only real people, with a wide range of perspectives. He jumped around often among storytellers to establish its scope, and at it moves on, the film begun to switch narrators less frequently. He alternated people who were still exceptionally emotional about their experiences with those that have a more distanced response, putting the audience in a position where they have to measure not only the fact itself, but also the effect that that fact has had on those people. Men described how they would make a throat cutting gesture toward the incoming Jews as they arrived in the death camps, but some said that they made that gestured a warning and others made it in order to taunt. Survivors talked about a deceiving cordiality from the guards, while the others talked about a brutal experience filled with confusion. Due to this the truth becomes almost irrelevant, the effect that those people's experiences have had on them is easily observed. It seems like somehow the past is defined by the present.

Healing seems to be tied in with the process of forgetting for these people, and since they are not capable to overlook the terror they experienced, healing seems impossible, until it becomes apparent that many of the people questioned have become distanced from their stories because they have told them over and over again.

Shoah" tells the story of the Holocaust from a particularly human and "everyman" viewpoint. Lanzmann realized that the victims of this horror were being forgotten and he took the initiative to search out the ones who had those hideous tattoos on their arms and just talk to them. He didn't want to be a part of the picture, Lanzmann had a very unique ability to flatter and even browbeat the experiences out of ordinary people who were subjects to unspeakable horrors.

Lanzmann's documentary wasted no time in establishing what caused the holocaust, it is not an impartial document of what happened. The fact is that it was an opportunity for the victims to describe what they outlived, a sure method in order for the world never to forget. An outstanding testament from those who were there and saw and felt such things as none could have imagined without the help of this documentary.

Holocaust is about people, whether they were the commanders who intimidated the Jews, individuals who had small farms or houses near the concentration camps or even the victims themselves. The director simply let us, subconsciously decode the image of Simon, or the barber, along with their emotions and apply them to the story they were telling, to point our own mental picture of how horrible the extermination camps truly were. Our imagination is much more powerful then any other written text.

All the stories gathered, formed into the watchers minds, a dark but concrete "photo" or reenactment of the events that took place during the World War II. Instead of presenting a series of cold facts about Holocaust, this documentary confronts viewers with accounts of those people that actually experienced the events in question. By doing that, it makes people aware of the specifics and the long-term repercussions of the holocaust.

Lanzmann felt that after forty years from the Jewish extermination, people would forget what murder against humanity meant or simply would not believe, so he wanted his documentary to be seen by those who after only forty years, didn't know, or chose not to believe about the holocaust. The forty years distance between the world war two and the time the director created the documentary does not diminish at all the usefulness of "Shoah" as a historical source. His film becomes a historical document, and an important one two, because he had the courage to take a testimony from the ones that knew best what had all been about.

Shoah" provides a genuine gateway to an understanding of the holocaust. It gave the 20 century man a chance to move beyond simple observation, beyond familiarity with the awful facts, to get past the horror and horrified puzzlement and the awe at the sheer immensity and complexity of the evil, beyond moral or theological perplexity. It is a real insight, a true intuitive grasp of the nature and meaning of the holocaust.

There are rare moments in the movie when the distance between past and present seems to evaporates, and the teller recalls the past with the intensity of the present. In the New York Time there is a review in witch Lanzmann confessed "Making a history was not what I wanted to do," Mr. Lanzmann said. "I wanted to construct something more powerful than that. And, in fact, I think that the film, using only images of the present, evokes the past with far more force than any historical document."

Lanzmann's style of interviewing by asking for the most important details shows, or rather lets some of his subjects themselves show, that the anti-Semitism that caused 6 million Jews to die in the holocaust is still alive in Germany, Poland and elsewhere.

The director demonstrated in his film that the human being is cruel and not cruel to animals or plants or things he can not comprehend, but cruel to himself, in one way or the other people seem to hate themselves by hating each other. In a way "Shoah" was structured it encouraged the viewer to ponder questions of individualism and history. It comes closer than any other documentary when it comes to showing people why life is so special and sacred.