132 Holocaust Impiety

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1 Part III Film Critics writing about Holocaust documentary have generally tended to gravitate towards the two iconic French films that are also discussed at length in this chapter: Alain Resnais s Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann s Shoah (1985). In academic discourse, these films have become joined at the hip, largely because of their polar-opposite aesthetic strategies, with the 9.5 hours of interview footage in Shoah marking a wholesale rejection of the horrific archival images that are a defining aspect of the 32-minute Night and Fog. Continuing to excite diverse theoretical and creative responses as they are discovered by new generations of viewers, critics and filmmakers, the centrality of these films to their genre reflects both their formal innovativeness and also, more generally, the way that Holocaust documentary has tended to be circumscribed more forcibly by chronological factors than other more self-evidently fictional forms of Holocaust representation, such as the two Hollywood films that are also included in this chapter, Tim Blake Nelson s The Grey Zone (2001) and Quentin Tarantino s Inglourious Basterds (2009). Holocaust documentaries are, by their very nature, highly dependent on access to the geographical sites of memory and eyewitness accounts, and, as Susan Gubar puts it, the Holocaust is dying, both in terms of the passing away of survivors and through various forms of cultural amnesia. 1 The end of the era of Holocaust testimony is brought to the fore in Shoah as a kind of motivating anxiety: the film closes with the Warsaw ghetto fighter Simha Rottem (alias Kajik ) recalling how, having escaped into the occupied area of Warsaw, he returned to the ghetto after the inhabitants had been deported and thought to himself, I m the last Jew. I ll wait for morning, and for the Germans. In this way, the last Jew has the film s last word, and the film itself becomes something of a full stop in the cinematic history of 131

2 132 Holocaust Impiety Holocaust documentary. As we enter a post-testimonial era, no future documentary filmmaker will ever be able to conduct original interviews with such witnesses, just as no writer will produce an investigative documentary-style account grounded in first-hand testimony in the manner of Hannah Arendt s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) or Gitta Sereny s Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (1974) and Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995). Many of the locations used in these films have also changed considerably over the years. The opening colour tracking shots of Night and Fog draw attention to the way that, only a decade after the liberation, time had already begun to cover over the traces of Nazi crimes. Resnais presents the viewer with footage of a derelict camp that is being reclaimed by the natural landscape and the narrator, Michel Bouquet, intones, the blood is caked, the cries stilled, the camera now the only visitor. Night and Fog and Shoah are both concerned with sites that were becoming disfigured or effaced what Lanzmann terms the non-sites of memory (non-lieux de mémoire) although neither quite foresaw how equally significant camp transformations would be effected in future years by deliberate state interventions, with the more accessible camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau being claimed by a burgeoning Holocaust industry and designated as official museums. 2 Whether a camp is left to ruin like Sobibor or Belzec or transformed into a sanitised tourist destination like Auschwitz, future documentary makers will not be able to engage with locations in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi genocide in the manner of Resnais, or to interview those involved in the manner of Lanzmann or his compatriot Marcel Ophüls. This, in turn, means that new documentary filmmakers are likely to look elsewhere for more urgent subject matter. While Holocaust novels, feature films and other works of the imagination are being produced in ever-increasing numbers, there is a sense in which the most historically significant Holocaust documentaries have already been made. Night and Fog and Shoah have thus come to define our sense of what a Holocaust documentary is and can be. In their aesthetic and technical singularity, they have also played a pivotal role in shaping the historical development of documentary filmmaking more widely. Both films were, of course, also informed by developing conventions in the genre to which they belonged conventions they both exploited and challenged. Following the film critic William Rothman, these films are thinking; they are thinking about thinking, and they are thinking about film, meditating on the powers and limits of the medium. 3 Night and Fog draws on the more traditional documentary technique

3 Film 133 of using historical footage with a dubbed narration and an orchestral soundtrack, but the film s extreme subject matter and picaresque imagery warp a form that in previous decades had been mainly limited to travelogues, news and political propaganda. In contrast, Shoah marks a key moment in the inception of the modern investigative documentary and offers a self-conscious response to the more traditional structure of Night and Fog and its perceived schematic linearity its dependence on what Lanzmann termed the expedients of history and chronological development. 4 Shoah also constitutes a wholesale rejection of the earlier film s impious use of graphic archive footage. In the manner of Ophüls, whose documentary about the French resistance, The Sorrow and the Pity, was made in 1969 but not shown until 1981 because of a ban imposed by the French government, Lanzmann abandoned the archive in favour of interviews with those directly involved in the genocide. These were often shot in locations that were directly or indirectly linked to the events that were being described. In this move from historical exposition to a more interview-driven style of documentary shot within a present day timeframe, the filmmaker became a key participant in the film s action and was often visible on camera a device that continues to be used in the work of influential documentary makers such as Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore. While Lanzmann can rightly be regarded as a defendant of Holocaust piety, this chapter will also examine some of the film s notable strands of Holocaust impiety, which include its director s methodology (whereby interviewees are lied to, subjected to aggressive accusations and compelled against their will to relive traumatic events), its occasional and often overlooked representational elements, and above all, its guiding ethos of imaginative recreation, even as it resists direct imagistic reproduction. More recently, a third category of Holocaust documentary has emerged in films such as The Last Days (1998) and television series such as The Nazis: A Warning from History (1997) and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution (2005). A kind of hybrid form conflating aspects of the traditional and the investigative documentary styles, these films and programmes make use of archival footage, voiceovers and interviews with eyewitnesses, while also using actors to recreate key historical events (usually shot in colour) and exploiting new technologies, such as computer-generated imagery. The proliferation of Nazi television documentaries in a period of around a decade, beginning in the mid-1990s, can be linked to a number of important anniversaries, such as the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of camps such as Auschwitz and Belsen, and a consciousness of the end of the era of Holocaust testimony

4 134 Holocaust Impiety that drew a commitment from the likes of the BBC and Steven Spielberg (who produced The Last Days and established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation) to ensuring that the accounts of first-hand witnesses were captured on film. This period also coincided with the release of a number of popular and critically acclaimed feature films that raised popular awareness of the Holocaust through highly dramatised narratives, with Spielberg s Schindler s List (1993), Benigni s Life Is Beautiful (1997) and Polanski s The Pianist (2002) all collecting numerous Academy Awards and other prizes. To some extent, the documentaries can be viewed as an attempt to provide a fuller factual backdrop to these dramatic recreations. Television documentaries are inherently impious in the way that they assume that the Holocaust can be represented through traditional means (cinematic naturalism) and that it can be explained through historical narrative. However, they have tended to be characterised by formal conservatism; what Resnais and Lanzmann have in common with Hollywood directors such as Nelson and Tarantino, on the other hand, is their self-conscious artistry an understanding that a documentary must of necessity be what Lanzmann termed a fiction rooted in reality [fiction du reel]. 5 Also displaying something of the inwardness of literary fiction and poetic monologues that engage directly with the psychology of particular subject positions, these two documentaries solicit a kind of response to the Holocaust that goes beyond the literal ingestion of facts; they seek the kind of understanding that can only be driven by dynamics of identification. In these films, our own psychology is deliberately brought into play; as Jay Cantor puts it, we project upon the screen s projections. 6 Our psychological investment is complicated by the fact that any cinematic medium is subtly coercive, foreclosing the distinction between the eye of the camera and what Rothman terms the I of the camera: each new shot, camera angle or scene shifts our position in respect of the images and events we are being shown. As the point of view of the camera is always coincidental with the visual (if not attitudinal) point of view of the viewer, these documentaries are able to reflect critically on relationships between viewers and images, presenting primary and secondary material through complex and often interlinked subject positions which can be passive or confrontational, involved or voyeuristic. In interviews and in footage shot at the geographical locations associated with the Nazi genocide, the camera may position the viewer as a bystander, a victim or even a perpetrator. This means that shooting an historical documentary is never a disinterested process, and shooting

5 Film 135 takes place in both senses of the word; as has often been noted in film studies, the camera has the power both to record and to inflict violence. Discussing the covert filming of the former SS man Franz Suchomel, who was stationed at Treblinka, Lanzmann concurred: How could I stand not to jump at [him] and kill him? [...] This was not my purpose. My purpose was to kill him with a camera. 7 Whether reclaiming forgotten histories or engaging in acts of aggression against the perpetrators, the films of Resnais and Lanzmann use the camera as an active agent in history-making: an agent that implicates the viewer through association. When it became known that a new film about the Nazis was being made by Quentin Tarantino, the enfant terrible of the Hollywood film industry best known for violent gangster films such as Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), few people would have anticipated that the final work would have any thematic or philosophical kinship with Shoah. The black humour, fast-paced dialogue and blood-soaked set pieces that were hallmarks of Tarantino s earlier films, and which still characterised Inglourious Basterds when it was premiered in Cannes in 2009, were about as far removed from the meditative, slow-paced, antirepresentational ethos of Shoah as possible. Yet, these two films, more than any others in the history of Holocaust cinema and perhaps in the history of cinema, are bound by the way that they engage seriously with the idea that films do not simply document the past as it was, but rather they actively produce it. Their bullish auteurs share an expressed belief in the unique power of cinema a belief in the experiential and social forcefulness of the medium and they are drawn together by the way that they seek to harness the power of cinema in the Holocaust context, which is to say as an instrument of anti-nazi aggression and ultimately of Jewish vengeance. The raison d être of both films is not Holocaust representation but Holocaust retribution. It is in this sense that they produce history, as their objective is to complete it, to influence its teleology. If Lanzmann s interviews with Suchomel were designed to kill him with a camera, then Tarantino s purpose in Inglourious Basterds was much the same, even as the sights of his murderous lens were set much wider. 8 In an interview following its release, Tarantino reflected on the final climactic scene of the film where leading Nazis, including Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Bormann, are blown up in a Paris art house cinema, and noted, I like the idea that it s the power of cinema that fights the Nazis. But not even as a metaphor as a literal reality. 9

6 136 Holocaust Impiety Both films are totally unconcerned with verisimilitude; instead, they explore and exploit the gap between the present and the past through eccentric dramatisations of historical material: history relived as painful memory in Shoah and revisionist fantasy in Inglourious Basterds. Both films are ordered by the Old Testament morality of the courthouse too, with Shoah providing a comprehensive body of evidence that gives the victims an everlasting name (its epigraph is taken from Isaiah 56:5) and punishes the perpetrators. Tarantino s morality is also Old Testament through and through, even as he represents the justice of the vigilante. A violent revenge fantasy for the crimes of the Holocaust the audience s knowledge of which is assumed a priori by the director the brutal, cold-blooded moral code of Inglourious Basterds is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but in a self-aware manner that recalls that this Hebraic phrase is not an incitement to retribution but rather a call to mercy that is designed to temper the urge to exact punishments that exceed the gravity of the original crime.

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