Claude Lanzmann Research Articles

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

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.

Placing the Location Outtakes of Shoah

This article considers how to read the location outtakes of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985). These film reels — now digitized and available on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website — often seem to offer little content, and demand different ways of viewing to make any sense of them. I link them to two other types of viewing experience: watching landscapes filmed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub and using online maps such as Google Street View to identify and navigate particular locations. Engaging with the outtakes in this way involves a consideration of the events of the Holocaust indexed by the locations and the images that Lanzmann made of them. It also makes it possible to glean something of the working methods of Lanzmann and his team. Finally, it offers a particular spatial experience in its own right, which, I argue, can serve as a form of Holocaust memorialization.

Jan Karski’s Representations – Representing Jan Karski: From Poland’s Secret Messenger to Holocaust Witness

ABSTRACT This article analyses the wide range of representations of the actions undertaken by Jan Karski. Karski was a courier for the wartime Polish government-in-exile, engaged to report on the situation in Poland, to Polish politicians in France in 1940, as well as to government leaders in London and Washington in 1942/3. Karski’s book about his diplomatic endeavors was published as early as 1944 (Story of a Secret State), but thereafter he maintained a long silence, one that was only broken in 1978 when he was interviewed for Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). From the 1980s onwards, Karski repeatedly testified to his wartime activities and experiences; he received numerous awards for his early warnings about the fate of the Polish Jews under the Nazis and became a celebrity among the ‘righteous’. Following his death in 2000, Karski’s mission has been reconsidered and subjected to wide-ranging interpretation. We take an arts and humanities approach to analyzing how far these shifting perspectives on Karski’s wartime undertakings respond to the different emphases in Karski’s postwar memoirs and his interviews in different media. The article therefore poses questions about narrative and aesthetic construction to compare Karski’s testimonies with the ways they have been represented in documentary film and fiction. We conclude that the idea of Karski’s mission has been adopted to diametrically opposed and polemical ends and attempt an adjudication between these often-incompatible representations.

Images which are not there. The Representations of the Final Solution in the Examples of Son of Saul and Kornblumenblau


 
 
 Since the problem of representing the Holocaust first emerged, philosophers, writers and filmmakers have tried to find appropriate aesthetic methods of expression. Two approaches dominate the thinking about the Shoah: Claude Lanzmann’s claim of “the event without images” and George Didi-Huberman’s “images in spite of all”. The author’s analysis deconstructs these two theoretical approaches through the interpretation of two films: the Polish Kornblumenblau and the Hungarian Son of Saul and the notion of “the images which are not there”, that is, the non-existent photographs of the Nazi “Final Solution”. The main thesis of the essay states that cinematic representation and artistic expression can substitute for the lack of historical and visual (mostly photographic) depictions of the Holocaust. With the inspiration of theory (Giorgio Agamben, Siegfried Kracauer), I consider different methods of dealing with the dilemma of “unimaginable Auschwitz” and the concept of “bare life” as an aesthetical problem.
 
 

The truth of reenactments: reliving, reconstructing, and contesting history in documentaries on genocide

ABSTRACT This article seeks to renegotiate the relationship between reenactment, truth, history, and the archive in documentaries on genocide. It moves away from the common binaries surrounding the supposed creativity and fictionality of reenactments as opposed to the evidentiary and static archive, and instead reads reenactments as facilitating access to truth. Through four case studies of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Laurence Rees’s Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005), Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013), and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), it contends that reenactments in documentaries on genocide problematize the associations of an image’s supposed indexical link to a past event with truth. Instead, reenactments confront us with the constructed nature of historical narrative and enable us to see affective, factual, and ethical truths of the past unavailable through the archive.

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Direct representation of genocide has long been considered taboo in Holocaust cinema. In particular, the ‘image prohibition’ claimed by Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, a milestone film in Holocaust film history, had a tremendous effect on artistic work concerning the Holocaust. However, Nemes László's film Son of Saul (2015) convincingly refutes the prevalent concerns about visual representation of Shoah. It manages to reconstruct the experience of a Sonderkommando member, a key witness of the Holocaust, by the careful arrangement of the camera's views, depth of field, and sound. To do this, the director takes seriously the issues regarding the Holocaust's unrepresentability, rather than ignoring or disputing them. If Shoah cannot be portrayed, it is because Shoah is a double annihilation in that it annihilated the Jews as well as the evidences of their annihilation. The film shows how the Nazi's destruction of representability can be placed in the order of representation at the level of not only film aesthetics but also narrative.

Funeral de Estado (Sergei Loznitsa, 2019): o funeral do documentário

From Claude Lanzmann’s controversial interdiction of documentary images produced by genocidal political regimes, this article analyzes the discursive choices of the documentary State Funeral (2019), from Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, against Harun Farocki’s Aufschub (2007), Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (1956), Vanessa Lapa’ The Decent One (2014) and Rithy Panh’s, L’image manquante (2013). All these films use archive footage. To what extent do totalitarian regimes’ official images, without the marks of enunciation of the director who manipulates them in the present, enable the image ethics, or do they resemble the perpetrators’ propaganda? The proposal presented here relativizes Lanzmann’s concept, but the contemporary director must turn explicit its discursive intervention and show himself as the film enunciator. In this way, he could re-signify and use these images. Authors like Cristina Teixeira Vieira de Melo, François Niney and Arlette Farge are discussed.

Recounting and Forgetting: The Epistemological and Ethical Limits of Narrative

The limits of narrative are epistemological and ethical: what can be narrated and what should be narrated? Can we recount everything, and if we could, are there even so some things that we should leave in silence? We hear a lot about the duty to remember and the right to tell one’s story, but are there some stories that cannot and should not be told? Could forgetting play a role in the ethical project of memory? Trauma narratives pose these questions in particularly fraught terms. Survivor-witnesses have a story to tell, but they are also often intensely aware that their story defies narratability and intelligibility. It must be told and cannot be told; it demands and resists understanding. This article explores these questions with reference to a number of case studies: Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious” (1942), J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), and a sequence from Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah (1985). In each case, the right or need to narrate is mitigated by an intense realisation that not everything can or should be told.

Jan Gross’s Neighbors and Poland’s Narrative Shock

Jan Gross’s Neighbors and Poland’s Narrative Shock Geneviève Zubrzycki (bio) Rare are the books that make history and alter collective memory. Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland is one. Neighbors described in painful detail how, in the summer of 1941, ethnic Poles tormented and murdered their Jewish neighbors in the small town of Jedwabne, in northeastern Poland. While Polish indifference toward the genocide of Polish Jews had been discussed in the mid-1980s following the broadcasting on Polish television of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary film Shoah and the 1987 publication of Jan Błoński’s essay “Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” in the prominent Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, it is Gross’s Neighbors that burst the dam and led to extended public debate and soul-searching about Polish violence against Jews during and after the Second World War. Almost immediately upon its publication, the book generated vigorous debate among historians.1 The Jedwabne pogrom was also the topic of passionate discussions in public seminars at cultural centers and churches, on radio talk shows, museums, or student clubs, and it was a common topic in private conversations taking place in homes, at workplaces, in stores, or on public transports. The Institute of National Remembrance, founded to investigate and enable the [End Page 234] prosecution of crimes against the Polish nation committed during the Second World War and the communist period, quickly opened an official investigation into the murders described by Gross.2 On July 10, 2001, on the sixtieth anniversary of the pogrom, the (leftist) government erected a monument at the site where several hundred Jews were forcibly brought to a barn and burned alive, and President Aleksander Kwaśniewski apologized on behalf of the Polish nation. Neighbors created such a rupture in the national narrative of the war that one could speak of Poland “before” and “after” its publication. Not only were Poles no longer cast as the main victims of the war; they were now perpetrators of some of its horror. By disrupting the Polish narrative of martyrdom—for one cannot be both a sacrificial victim and a willing executioner—Neighbors provoked what I have called “narrative shock,” the questioning of a key story of the nation, shaking its identity to its core.3 The shock was so great that many turned to denial and counteraccusations: “It was not Poles who killed the Jews, but the Germans,” “There were far fewer Jews murdered than Gross claimed,” or even “The Jews had it coming after all, since they collaborated with the Soviets.” Such opinions were frequently expressed in newspaper editorials and letters to the editor, academic panels, public roundtables, and church sermons. A counter-memorial to Polish victims of the war, monumentalizing that perspective, was dedicated on Jedwabne’s main square in 2003.4 Almost predictably, in 2011, neofascist vandals defaced the Jedwabne memorial to the Jews who were murdered by spray-painting on stones surrounding the monument the statements “They were flammable” and “I do not apologize for Jedwabne.”5 Among groups on the right, any attempt at discussing Poles’ participation in the Holocaust is perceived as defamation and a profanation of the Polish nation, which is held sacred. It is to counter what they call the [End Page 235] “politics of shame” and to protect the nation at home and its “good name” abroad, that the Law and Justice government, supported by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the right-wing Radio Maryja, and various nationalist organizations are engaged in a process of remythologization that ranges from outright denial to the promotion of new narratives of Polish-Jewish relations. In recent years, for example, attention has been redirected toward Poles who rescued Jews and who are honored by Israel as “Righteous among the Nations.” Their actions have been commemorated in numerous museums, monuments, murals, and movies. The historian Jan Grabowski has nicknamed that rhetorical strategy the “Righteous defense.”6 Public attention has also been redirected toward other Polish stories of Polish martyrdom, such as the Katyń Massacres, where some twenty thousand Polish army officers, intellectuals, and civilian prisoners were murdered in 1940 by...

Bearing Witness in Analog and Digital Witness Films: Ethical Aesthetics in Shoah [1985] and Waltz with Bashir [2008

In the ongoing and passionate debates over the digitalization of visual media, many questions about the ontology or materiality of the new digital image have been raised. Analog representation is often thought of in terms of indexicality and sometimes a naive belief in the truthfulness of the photographic image, whereas the digital image is, in a way, no longer an image anymore, but a set of data in flux, superficially coded and easy to manipulate. The following article examines how this shift to digitalization affects the ethical genre per se: the witness film. In a film analytical close reading of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, resonances become visible to psychoanalysis, Deleuzian film philosophy and the debates over the materiality of the analog and digital image. Lanzmann draws on a specific kind of indirect indexicality, which is highly interested in the psychic and embodied realities of surviving, witnessing and the passing of time, whereas Folman develops a politics of the powers of the false: truthfulness, accessibility and memorability are abolished in favor of false images, screen-memories and traumatic mis/representation, which are staged noticeably digital and altered, revolving around the impossibility to grasp the ungraspable.

Erin McGlothlin, Brad Preger, and Markus Zisselsberger, editors. The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Outtakes. Wayne State UP, 2020.

Erin McGlothlin, Brad Preger, and Markus Zisselsberger, editors. The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Outtakes. Wayne State UP, 2020.

Emancipatorska uloga umetnosti i medija u reprezentaciji traume

Art and the media have a significant role in the representation of reality, and throughout their history, they have often been a powerful tool for social and political elites to achieve their goals. It is, therefore, not surprising that, during the reign of totalitarian regimes and in crisis social situations, art and the media claim the absolute right to the truth, acting as a means of propaganda, imprinting the desired ideas in the consciousness of citizens as an audience. There are numerous papers in which the capacities of art and media are presented and analyzed, considering their roles in social engagement and manipulation. Starting from the theoretical views of Jacques Rancière (emancipated viewer) and H. M. Enzensberger (emancipatory role of the media), the paper will analyze the cohesion of art and media in the process of representing the past, especially when it is a source of traumatic experiences. The great crisis generated by World War II, and the Holocaust as a product of it, was a generator of a global trauma as well as the source of a series of individual traumas. Through specific examples related to the field of radio drama, movie, and the media, we will try to re-examine the capacities of art forms and media texts in representing trauma, as well as their ability to bring horrible events from the past to the audience. Does the essence of a work of art represent its capacity to be a transmitter of traumatic experiences or is it a ramp, a border, a line of defense for the audience, considering the fact that, even in its most inherent form, a work of art is more moderate than the reality it refers to? The key case studies in the analysis of the presented hypotheses will be two artistic, media texts, both from 1985: The movie Shaw (by Claude Lanzmann) and the radio drama Searching for Ashes (Djordje Lebovic / Slobodan Boda Markovic).

Claude Lanzmann’s The Four Sisters (2017) on Television

This article analyses Claude Lanzmann’s final work, The Four Sisters (2017), in the context of its being edited from the outtakes of Shoah (1985) for broadcast on the Arte television channel. It argues that the distinctive features of the film, including its form as a quartet of self-contained interviews, absence of location footage and reliance on certain kinds of shot construction and mise-en-scène, arise from this televisual production context, as well as seeming to mark an ambivalent effort on the director’s part to redress his earlier work’s focus on male testifiers.

Sites of violence and their communities: critical memory studies in the post-human era

“Sites of Violence and their Communities” presents the results of a research project that brought together scholars and practitioners of memory work in an attempt to critically reinterpret the links between sites, their (human, and non-human) users, and memory. These interdisciplinary discussions focused on overlooked, repressed or ignored sites of violence that may benefit from new approaches to memory studies, approaches that go beyond the traditional focus on communication, symbolism, representation and communality. Clandestine or contested sites, in particular, pose challenging questions about memory practices and policies: about the status of unacknowledged victims and those who witnessed their deaths; about those who have inherited the position of “bystander”; about the ontology of human remains; and about the ontologies of the sites themselves, with the natural and communal environments implicated in their perdurance. Claude Lanzmann – one of the first to undertake rigorous research on abandoned, uncommemorated or clandestine sites of violence – responded to Pierre Nora’s seminal conception with his work and with the critical notion of “non-lieux de mémoire.” Methodologies emerging from more traditional as well as recently introduced perspectives (like forensic, ecological, and material ones) allowed team members to engage with such “non-sites of memory” from new angles. The goal was to consider the needs and interests of post-conflict societies; to identify and critically read unofficial transmissions of memory; and to re-locate memory in new contexts – in the grassroots of social, political and institutional processes where the human, post-human and natural merge with unanticipated mnemonic dynamics.

Vernacular historical practices on Holocaust non-sites of memory in Poland

The approach employed by memory activists to sites of memory often involves historical practices. This paper presents the results of the examination of historical practices undertaken in locations of Holocaust violence during World War II and the disposal of victims’ remains that were not memorialised properly according to local residents or other groups with an interest in the sites’ past. The analysed practices were observed in the course of field research in various locations in Poland. The goal of the research was to describe these practices, discuss their critical potential, and indicate their distinct features as activities pertaining to contested sites of memory. A central tool for approaching this task is found in concepts of “non-site of memory” and “vernacular historian” as introduced to the debate by Claude Lanzmann and Lyle Dick. As a result, the article presents the cases of four vernacular historians whose practices are experimental combinations of the components of the work of professional historians and ways of working conditioned by local cultural environments, individual experience and commitment to communal life. Although vernacular history is sometimes considered of little value by academic historians, the research shows that the practices in question have the potential to produce new, socially relevant knowledge. Two distinct features of vernacular historical practices in non-sites of memory were observed: these unmarked sites of burial attract activists and prompt them to undertake historical practices; vernacular historians of these locations often undertake unconventional, sometimes experimental activities..

Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

“Non-sites of memory”

This article analyses some of the 30 hours of location footage excluded from Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah. Although there has been some analysis of the outtake material in Lanzmann’s archive which consists of eyewitness interviews, very little attention has been paid to the footage of landscape, urban and camp settings, from which we have drawn these examples of Polish sites. We argue that it is possible to discern the presence of a specifically spatial memory by considering this excluded material in a way that draws on its outtake status, that is, its form of 11-minute reels unaccompanied by eyewitness presence or voiceover. The filmic construction of spaces to suit Lanzmann’s concerns is revealed if we attend to this material in its unedited state, with its constituent repetitions and exclusions, as a spatial version of the director’s customary interest in the reincarnation of the past in the present.

Israel on the Screen: Between Reality and Fantasy

Israel on the Screen:Between Reality and Fantasy Yaron Peleg and Eran Kaplan Arguably more than any other artform, cinema can combine realism and fantasy, mimic the world as we see and experience it, and create images of our inner worlds, our imagination. The tension between realism and fantasy is one of cinema's most alluring aspects, and it is commonly acknowledged by what we call film styles or genres. By and large, and with some notable exceptions, Israeli cinema is immersed in reality. Rather than escape realism, it seems eager to explore, again and again, the nature of the traumatic core of the Israeli experience and force the viewers to face it. Israeli cinema and visual culture are almost obsessed with political, historical, and social issues, which are woven into narratives that sometimes take the form of social or national allegory. At the same time, a strong concern with reality does not necessarily lead to realistic cinema and television in Israel, especially when commercial considerations and the potential distribution in the global media market come into play. In this special issue, our contributors explore the relationship between realism and fantasy in Israeli cinema and TV and look at Israeli visual realism and the tensions therein. Our exploration begins with Ohad Landesman's article on the work of Claude Lanzmann and his documentary trilogy, Israel, Why? (1973), Shoah (1985), and Tzahal (1994), in which the celebrated documentarist reflects on the Zionist triumphalist narrative known as "from Shoah to t'kuma [revival]." Landesman explores Lanzmann's complex attitude toward this narrative, especially his contribution to exposing some of the realities behind it while [End Page 1] perpetuating some of its myths. Eran Kaplan describes how the harsh political realities of the Middle East in the TV series Fauda lose political signification as they become part of a tech or cyber universe. Kaplan shows how the hyperreality of the show is not concerned with the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as fighters do not do battle for their nations but in what amounts to a globalized corporate tech race powered by the neoliberal world order. Oded Nir looks at Israeli films and television programs that use allegory as a formal means of exposing socioeconomic antagonisms that often remain hidden. Nir uses Jameson's term "world reduction" to show the tensions between neoliberal logic and the welfare state in Fauda, The Band's Visit (2007), and In Between (2016). Yaron Peleg looks at how cinema handles various religious realities in Israeli culture in three distinct films, Ushpizin (2003), The Wedding Plan (2016), and Tikkun (2015). The first two films adopt popular generic conventions to translate unique Israeli religious realities, and the third film articulates a new language that tries to give visual form to Jewish religiosity. Vered Weiss concludes the issue with an article about the Israeli adaptation of the vampire genre in the television series Juda (2017). Weiss looks at the genre's local brew, into which antisemitic tropes and more unique Israeli ethnic tensions have been mixed to create a telling fantasy. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press

American Public Memory and The Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations by Lisa A. Costello

Reviewed by: American Public Memory and The Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations by Lisa A. Costello Jennifer Rich (bio) American Public Memory and The Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations. By Lisa A. Costello. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. x + 219 pp. Lisa Costello considers what and how society remembers about the Holocaust as we move further into a post-survivor era. As a rhetorician, Costello looks to fill a gap in scholarship that examines "how gender is performed in public memory processes to reengage, shift, or 'queer' audience orientations" (2). To this end, each chapter in this volume examines a "public memory artifact" (13). Public memory includes embodied knowledge, texts, videos, films, and museums "that perform memory, subvert binary gender constructions, and reorient audiences to connect" with the memory in question (7). Costello is especially interested in public memory created and shared by survivors and their families. This important monograph encourages readers to consider the relationship between gender, performance, and rhetoric in previously unexplored ways. The introduction is centered in the field of linguistics, and, at times, is steeped in theoretical language that may present challenges to readers in other disciplines. Chapters are connected through rhetorical concepts, most notably the idea of kairos, "a force of time that is sometimes in opposition to chronos (as chronological time) because it exerts pressure at unexpected moments" (7). Kairos, Costello explains, "is catalyzed by the movements between 'discursive moment(s)' (such as the discursive moment that a film is released and discussed), when a rhetor addresses the reader or listener" (7). In simple terms, kairos is an interaction between the creator and the listener, viewer, or reader, intended to jolt the ones taking in the creation out of their present space and into a different one. These rhetorical concepts are deployed throughout the volume, but each chapter can stand alone and is framed both within the field of rhetoric and outside of it. The first two chapters of the volume deal with film, including documentary, Hollywood movies, and recorded survivor testimony. In Chapter One, "Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and the Opening of Testimony Archives," and Chapter Two, "Schindler's List and its 'After-Affect,'" Costello carefully considers not only these two films, but also previously unexplored outtakes from Lanzmann's epic Hungarian film Son of Saul and recorded survivor testimony residing in the University of Southern California Shoah Oral History Archive. Costello asks if these visual representations of public memory will "remain simply chronos, a point on a timeline, or will it become kairos, that force that can open dialogic witness" (46). With this question, she suggests that they are powerful [End Page 292] enough to engage the viewers in a rupture in time, that viewers will respond emotionally and consider how to take the film into their own lived experiences. In this way, embodied memory lives within more individuals. Costello then shifts to written texts as forms of public memory and concentrates her argument around gender. Chapter Three examines two auto/biographies written by women. Ruth Kluger and Ruth Levy were survivors; Anne Levy is Ruth Levy's daughter. This chapter argues that women survivors delayed sharing their lived experiences because, historically, "women simply do not tell important stories – men do" (88). Costello does not summarize the texts written by these women but examines them, again, through the rhetorical lens of kairos. She argues that the authors wrote in response to the Holocaust, to bear witness, but, more urgently, to "warn humanity" (94). In this warning, that history was not inevitable and can repeat, Costello sees the written narrative as engaging readers across time and space. Costello's strongest chapter examines two films by and about the descendants of Holocaust survivors: the 2012 Israeli documentary Numbered, and a short 2009 Australian video called Dancing in Auschwitz. Both films are controversial in different ways. Numbered documents Israeli teens who have tattooed their grandparents' numbers from Auschwitz on their own bodies. Dancing in Auschwitz is a music video, of sorts, where a Holocaust survivor and his descendants literally dance at Auschwitz and in other sites of terror to the disco song "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor. Rather than a focus on an analysis...

Claude Lanzmann 27 November 1925–5 July 2018

Claude Lanzmann <i>27 November 1925–5 July 2018</i>