University of Cape Town – FAM3003S

Jacques De Villiers

18 November 2016

‘The Fascination of Banality’:

What we can deal with in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985)

“… Many have died. Auschwitz,

Its furnace chambers and lime pits

Half-erased, is half-dead; a fable

Unbelievable in fatted marble.

There is, at times, some need to demonstrate

Jehovah’s touchy methods, that create

The connoisseur of blood, the smitten man.

At times it seems not common to explain.”

– Geoffrey Hill in his poem ‘Of Commerce and Society’

Shoah appears today as perhaps the best evidence of the truth of Theodor Adorno’s sentiment that ‘there can be no Art after Auschwitz’. At nine-and-a-half hours long (apparently extracted from 350 hours of raw footage over 5 years of editing), it isn’t ‘Art’ at all, and, at times, even having only watched half of it, it doesn’t feel very much like a film either. ‘Art’ implies artifice and ‘film’ implies brevity and entertainment. Shoah annihilates both of these categories with the mechanistic ruthlessness of its own villains. If we think it a slight burden to give a day of our lives over to an immersion in the living memory of the Holocaust, Shoah shames us for not giving over our whole souls too. It is too strange that such things happened, but the greatest astonishment is that so many witnesses could live with themselves for long enough to eventually tell Lanzmann their tales.

The deep shock we feel with him[1]at having to fully reckon with the reality of the death camps finds its cinematic expression here in perhaps the most intense example of Deleuze’s Time-Image imaginable.  The Holocaust is probably the worst crime humanity has ever perpetrated, and so its unique reputation helps set it as the generally acknowledged borderline of all Narrative and Explanation. If we were to reduce what happened to a relatable story or a societal diagnosis, it would both do a sheer disservice to the innocent dead and challenge human evil to exceed its precedents. Yet the Holocaust itself cannot be forgotten for fear of future generations losing touch with its terrors and the terrors of fascism in general. So Lanzmann doesn’t tell the Holocaust. He shows it. And after thirty-plus years, the only things left to show of it are its ruins and its survivors.[2]

This is where cinema itself becomes necessary: the dead, and the moments of their deaths, are always already gone from us, but the most direct recordings of their remaining traces can only be accessed through the moving image. Just as we can watch Shoah today with the distance of decades and recognize that so many of its featured witnesses must now themselves have passed away in turn, we can see the physical evidence of the camps’ walls and feel the accuracy in the given testimonies and know in a way no fiction can provide that all of it did indeed happen. From the materials provided, we can know every detail of the extermination process just as surely as we can study the captured face of a barber in Israel or an old farmer in Poland or a former SS Guard in West Germany and understand that these people are not characters, and never have been. What they were all a part of self-evidently exceeds any audience’s ability to co-opt their lives into a greater meaning. 

As such, there is no real beginning or end to Shoah, just as there is no definite life-span for personal or communal memory. All the things that happened during the years in question – the gassings at Chelmno, the death-production at Auschwitz, the Warsaw Uprising – circle round each other incessantly, accumulating density and darkness through a palimpsest of voices until the film arbitrarily runs out, Lanzmann cutting the process short. It could go on forever, but we at least still have our lives and our comfort, and without the necessary modicum of editorial control, the film would oblige us to slip into the abyss along with its depicted victims. What Shoah then inevitably lacks is a conclusion, a settlement on motive. To all intents and purposes, the film depicts the Nazis’ choice to pursue the Final Solution as a kind of competition with Time itself to eradicate the presence of an entire people in the quickest interval possible. The direct industrialization of death seems to negativize the profit-motive. All feeling is inverted into manifest negation.

In this sense, the film ahistoricizes its subject matter in a manner that fails to teach us how to respond to a potential re-emergence of the far right today. It is just a record of Aftermath – utterly perfect, but unhelpful, except in the way that it intimates how even humanity’s most awful representatives ultimately have nothing on the destructive capacities of Time and Death as such. This is a useful lesson, and the film does deserve its place in the upper echelons of metaphysical aesthetics, but the lesson I take out of watching it is one that it doesn’t explicitly state: build a better world, or this will happen again.

[1]So evident in his repeated appeals to his interview subjects for greater and greater detail due to the inherent ‘importance’ of the information divulged.

[2]The devastating absence of any footage from the event itself has caused more than a few historians and filmmakers – Jean-Luc Godard, most famously among them – to drive themselves almost mad with cinematic recrimination.