Gender in the Archive: The Dialogic Potential of Public Memory in the Outtakes from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

Abstract

The original version of the film Shoah had an enormous impact on the revival of Holocaust memory. However, women appeared only a few times over the course of those nine long hours. Even though Lanzmann’s film achieved complexity in its representation of places, it failed to equally represent the experiences of both women and men, which is a disservice to all survivors. In 2016, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) released over 220 hours of additional outtake footage from Shoah, never seen by the public. The outtakes reveal longer interviews with women, and these missing voices shed light on women’s experiences during the Holocaust in more detail. I argue that the “outtakes” of this film can be used by audiences to deconstruct gender “neutralities” around testimony to reimagine public memory narratives and spaces about the Holocaust as highly gendered. In the “rhetorical process of gendering” in public memory, so-called “neutral” public memory narratives can be challenged by newly discovered artifacts like the outtakes. Though Shoah had elements of ambiguity, there was no way to challenge its strict binary in gender representation— until now. This active audience engagement with Holocaust artifacts, what I call performative memorialization, marks a kairotic force in Holocaust memorialization; the past collapses into the present to elicit a dialogic of active audience participation.