Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays, Stuart Liebman, ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), xi + 253 pp. + 20 halftones, cloth $99.00, pbk. $30.00.

Abstract

Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays, edited (and, in part, translated) by Stuart Liebman, is an important collection that will prove indispensable to scholars and students of Lanzmann's monumental film. More broadly, it will appeal to anyone interested in Holocaust cinema and this seminal moment in its history—a film that Liebman terms “a cultural achievement of the greatest magnitude” (p. 4). In his introduction, Liebman points out the filmmaker's groundbreaking accomplishment in premiering Shoah in 1985, when few eyewitness accounts had reached broad audiences and videotaping projects were in their infancy. While there had been significant films on the Holocaust, none, according to Liebman, “had faced the awful facts of the Jewish genocide head on, without political distortion or mystification” (p. 6). Indeed, Lanzmann's signal achievement was his refusal to transform, instrumentalize, mythologize, or otherwise mitigate the horrors on which he focused. Nor did he wish to give a causal explanation or even memorialize in traditional terms. Rather, by insisting on the “moral proximity of the Shoah”—on its immediacy—Lanzmann made the past present for viewers “without adulteration, and with its ironies and horrors intact in all their grisly complexity” (p. 9). This immediacy is effected through the use of testimonial fragments that Lanzmann describes as constituting “an incarnation, a resurrection” (quoted on p. 13); as viewers of the film well know, the filmmaker concentrates on the mechanics of mass murder without any recourse to archival film clips, whose truth value he suspected. Liebman notes that “a firm principle thus anchors Lanzmann's film: mimesis, the pictorial reproduction of the awful circumstances in which the Jews met death, is not essential for—indeed, is a hindrance to—anamnesis, the calling to mind of the process of their destruction” (p. 14). Such anamnesis (really a different type of memorialization, perhaps without sentimentality) is assisted by Lanzmann's other innovation: the staged cinematic return of principal witnesses to the landscapes of their suffering. While by now this has become a common trope in Holocaust film (and other media), it was not as common in 1985. Altogether, Liebman's incisive introduction focuses on the enduring and disarming immediacy of Lanzmann's film and its argument against sense-making abstractions of the Holocaust, including those embodied in the use of the name itself. In creating a work of imposing length and in his refusal to present an all-encompassing narrative of the Shoah, in projecting disjunctures and pauses and long silences, Lanzmann “imposes an uncommon burden on the spectators of Shoah, one that requires commitment, sharpened attention, and reflection” (p. 17).