Lanzmann's Shoah Research Articles

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...

Chantal Akerman: Afterlives ed. by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson

Reviewed by: Chantal Akerman: Afterlives ed. by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson Tessa Nunn Schmid, Marion. Emma Wilson, eds. Chantal Akerman: Afterlives. Legenda, 2019. ISBN 978-1-781886-39-7. Pp. 170. The thirteen essays constituting this edited collection offer diverse perspectives on the creative works and legacy of the Belgian film director, author, and installation artist Chantal Akerman. Her approaches to creating art as the child of a Holocaust survivor and representing mother-daughter relationships are recurrent themes throughout the diverse chapters. Unlike most studies on Akerman that focus predominately on her innovative films of the 1970s and 1980s, this book, centered on representations of identity and memory, gives more attention to her later films, installations, and literary productions. Instead of emphasizing her novel methods of filming women, the authors explore the multifaceted ways in which Akerman's works grapple with traces of the past, empathetic observation, and the representation of what is invisible or unspeakable. Her films and texts thus transmit secrets, traditions, or anxiety. According to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Akerman's portrayals of Jewish identity seek to express an ineffable absence through the theme of non-belonging. Hilde D'Haeyere and Steven Jacobs explain how Akerman drew from American slapstick to create Demain on déménage (2004), a comedy haunted by memories of the Holocaust and exile. Comparing Akerman's films to Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Anat Zanger shows how Akerman represents processes of remembering and forgetting through thresholds, material objects, personal writing, and anxious gazes. Analyzing temporality and collective memory, the authors nuance the role of Akerman's mother Natalia in the director's depictions of mother daughter-relationships. For Jenny Chamarette, Akerman's films rethink the passage of time in a way that refuses aging by creating a genealogy of interchangeable female figures. Several chapters reflect on the director's polymorphic representations of pleasure and [End Page 274] sexuality. Alice Blackhurst demonstrates how Akerman represents mothers engaging in the ritual of smoking to see themselves independent of maternity, connect with the sensory world, and take pleasure in not having to explain themselves. Investigating how Akerman's films and installations allow for empathetic viewing, So Mayer draws from Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology to scrutinize cinematic attempts to document racial hate and question definitions of human rights. Essays by Albertine Fox, Adam Roberts, and Cyril Béghin study the ethics of the formal choices in Akerman's work with regard to gestures of listening, silence made visible, the musicality of her films, and her dramaturgical uses of light. Emma Wilson and Marion Schmid present Akerman as both a reader and a writer in her literary productions and cinematic adaptations. Refusing to negate the artist's lived experience and position within a global collective memory, this book provides methods of understanding cinema and art in relation to the creator's personal history, particularly with regards to familial memories of trauma. The diverse theoretical frameworks utilized in the essays allow for interdisciplinary discussions of Akerman's oeuvre and propose new approaches for film studies. Elegantly written, this publication will interest scholars of European cinema, documentaries, multimedia art, cinematic adaptations of nineteenth-century literature, cultural memory, and the Holocaust. Tessa Nunn Duke University (NC) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Lanzmann's Shoah after Twenty-Five Years: An Overview and a Further View

This review essay examines several features of Lanzmann's classic film, assessing the tensions between the director's choices in his film and his public statements outside the film. By employing a perspective taken from live theater and applying it to Lanzmann's treatment of the film's witnesses, and evaluating the structural and thematic influence of the historian Raul Hilberg, the author seeks to define the legacy of the film twenty-five years after its original release.

Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust

Susan Sontag said that ‘shooting’ a subject and shooting a human being (the camera and the gun) are ‘congruent activities’. Libby Saxton takes this dictum seriously in her treatment of the Holocaust and the ethics of film-making and spectatorship to produce a work of immense maturity and sensitivity on the topic. She approaches some of the classic films on the Holocaust – Nuit et brouillard, Shoah, Schindler's List – and some of the heated critical debates in France in recent years about the representation of atrocity, not to take sides (as is so often the case) nor to moralise on interdictions and prohibitions, but to consider the ‘ethical dynamics’ of different strategies of film-making and spectatorship. She disentangles polemical pronouncements from actual works to show that, despite the apparent opposition between the anti-representational stance of Claude Lanzmann and the belief in the historical and testimonial power of the image expressed by Jean-Luc Godard and Georges Didi-Huberman, Lanzmann's Shoah and Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma have more in common than one might think. Central to Saxton's argument is the view that responsible forms of witnessing atrocity involve making absences speak and, as Jacques Rancière says, ‘mak(ing) manifest the invisible’ by revealing the image's eternal gesture to an elusive elsewhere (hence the title ‘haunted images’). In this sense, Lanzmann's staged incarnations of trauma through affectively-charged gestures in the present and Godard's staged encounter between cinema and suffering through a dizzying montage of images both represent, in their different ways, an ethical encounter with horror by exploring the ambivalent process of witnessing catastrophe and loss. Saxton's careful and nuanced approach also dismisses the opposition between Nuit et brouillard and Shoah (advocated largely by Lanzmann himself according to the use or non-use of the archive) to show a common concern with material traces in the present and the ethics of spectatorship. For Saxton, film becomes ‘a site of ethical reflection’, no matter what filmic strategy is employed, when it refuses to aestheticise the real and to trap the other within a screen of the same, and self-consciously dramatises its own blindness. Serge Daney's famous critique of ‘le travelling’ in Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo serves as a timely reminder of the frontier between responsible and irresponsible filming. Drawing also on Agamben's discussion of the Muselmann in the camps and, more importantly, Levinas's writing on ethics and the alterity of the ‘visage’, she concludes with a fascinating analysis of the face in the early films of Resnais and Marker to show how the gaze in their works is transformed from spectacle into an exchange of glances without closure. This is responsible witnessing because, in refusing the voyeuristic impulse and asserting the primacy of non-seeing, these film-makers stage film's response to history not as an alignment of the camera and the gun but as ‘a series of missed encounters’. Written in lucid prose, and combining philosophical insight with brilliant film criticism, this book will be the leading statement on ways of seeing the Holocaust for years to come.

The Illiterate Reader: Aphasia after Auschwitz

On the bases of discussions of Art Spiegelman's Maus and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah , as well as of Charlotte Delbo's, Jean Améry's, and Primo Levy's memoirs, Fred Wander's The Seventh Well , John Felstiner's translation of Celan's Todesfuge , and Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader , this paper presents a model for reading the Holocaust structured around the ideas of “illiteracy” and “aphasia,” the opportunity to transform linguistic disability into a means of access to what seems “beyond the word.” Rather than precluding insight, verbal insufficiency serves as a form of “negative capability,” the potential to dwell in a space with no complete answers, no security, respecting the terms upon which victims of the event had to read their own experience. Using specifically language-related terms emphasizes the difference between knowing about an event through representation and knowledge from direct personal exposure, not to detract from the limits of understanding outlined by trauma theory but to decouple the experience of trauma itself from reading about it. Our belatedness, reading “after Auschwitz,” carries the ethical obligation to recognize the distinction between then and now, between illiteracy as inability to derive meaning from an event without context and a willful blindness that chooses to deny, between aphasia from immediate injury and aphasia from posthumous grief. The Nazi genocide of the Jews leaves a legacy of semantic abuse, yet the voice of the witness also persists, allowing us to turn linguistic breakdown into insight. To read with insightful illiteracy, to recognize our aphasic limitations, is not merely a strategy for coming to terms with the Holocaust but an ethical necessity.

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.

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).

The Anti-Archive? Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and the Dilemmas of Holocaust Representation

The Anti-Archive? Claude Lanzmann's <i>Shoah</i> and the Dilemmas of Holocaust Representation

Possessed by the Past: Agency, Inauthentic Testimony, and Wilkomirski's Fragments

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For reflection on the exposure of Wilkomirski's text as inauthentic, see Geller (2002 Geller , Jay . “The Wilkomirski Case: Fragments or Figments?” American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 59 ( 2002 ): 343 – 65 . [Google Scholar]); for discussion of genre, memory and the Holocaust memoir, see Hungerford (2001) and Suleiman (2000 Suleiman , Susan Rubin . “Problems of Memory and Factuality in Recent Holocaust Memoirs: Wilkomirski/Wiesel.” Poetics Today 21 ( 2000 ): 543 – 55 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); Murphy (2004) interrogates the relationship between history and trauma theory; Whitehead (2004 Whitehead , Anne . Holocaust Fiction . Edinburgh : Edinburgh UP , 2004 . [Google Scholar]) considers Fragments in the context of Swiss cultural memory. See Lappin. For a discussion of the Holocaust as an “event without a witness,” see Laub, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth Testimony and Survival.” I am referring here principally to the work of Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman as having had a founding influence. By “theories of trauma and testimony,” I wish to indicate a distinctive field of inquiry but do not intend to suggest that the critical positions it includes are identical in approach and emphasis. Louis Montrose delineates the relationship between literature and history as follows: “By the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest the cultural specificity, the social embedment, of all modes of writing. … By the textuality of history, I mean to suggest, firstly, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question … and secondly, that those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are constructed as the ‘documents’ upon which historians ground their own texts, called ‘histories’”(20). The extent to which these theories achieve their stated objectives is, of course, subject to debate. Dominick LaCapra has offered necessary and cogent critical evaluations of work on trauma and testimony, expressing a concern that “so great has been the preoccupation with testimony and witnessing that they have in some quarters almost displaced or been equated with history” (11). However, perhaps especially in the context of such critiques, it is important to recognize the theoretical context within which this emphasis emerges. LaCapra has offered a powerful critique of Felman's work on testimony on the grounds that it is implicated in a problematic transferential relationship; this concern is most uncompromisingly expressed in LaCapra's assertion that Felman's reading of Lanzmann's Shoah is “one of celebratory participation based on empathy or positive transference undisturbed by critical judgement” (112). My interest is in the way the listener to or reader of testimony may retain a degree of agency even (and perhaps especially) when appearing to abdicate such agency through over-identification with the testifier. With regard to Fragments as a contested testimony, we might ask what desires might be invested in a wish to suppress Wilkomirski's text, to deny it a readership, and to erase the memory of its reading? Equally, what desires might be invested in a wish to recover or preserve the experience of reading Fragments as meaningful in the face of its discrediting? Indeed, to what extent might the intellectual energy invested in the production of this paper represent an unconscious attempt on the part of the author to recuperate and redeem an “innocent” initial reading of Fragments? Amy Hungerford suggests that the author of Fragments “absorbed the accounts of camp life, the stories of extreme violence, the testimonies and histories and photographs, and they finally became him, finally made him Binjamin Wilkomirski” (88). Additional informationNotes on contributorsRachel CarrollRachel Carroll lectures in English Studies at the University of Teesside in the United Kingdom. Her research interests are in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, feminist theory, and representations of subjectivity, memory, and history.

Ida Fink's Scraps and Traces: Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives

Ida Fink's Scraps and Traces:Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives Ruth Ginsburg "Ja, Das ist der Plaz" ["Yes, this is the place"]—Simon Strebnik, the survivor of the Chelmno extermination camp, identifies, in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah,1 a site of innocent "nothing," covering up and silencing an act of annihilation, an act of eradication. A site of absence like this, where you see nothing because you see "nothing," a place that arrests a time of disappearing, of vanishing into nothing, is what I would tentatively call a "negative" chronotope. And "Yes, of course she recognizes it. Why shouldn't she? That was their last ghetto" (135).2 Yes, this is the place the nameless survivor in Ida Fink's story "Traces" identifies in an old photograph as "their last ghetto," reduced "in the last stage . . . to this one little" snow covered "street" (136). There are traces of footsteps in the snow in the foreground. Reduced, voided, silenced and covered up, the place stores the time of extinction. The woman, and the reader, are made to look into a void, into a "non-transcendent emptiness," an emptiness that is not a spiritually charged, capitalized "Nothingness," nor a nothing that encapsulates the Human Condition. Neither does it indicate an endless speculation of a deadly serious language-game. It is simply empty. This empty place is an ambivalent space that is and is not itself. It is that "nothing" that has not "been able to fill, or even cover over, the gaping pit."3 It marks its radical difference from its own past. It is a trace of itself. Here, again, [End Page 205] is a "negative" chronotope. In this case too, it structures a narrative that attempts to capture the moment of disappearance in a place charged with "not," a place under erasure (cf. Baer 20, 23). One could choose from a vast number of terms for that which was and is no more, to distinguish it from that which has never been. The concepts negating presence, from absence to disappearance, from emptiness to void and nothingness, have a long history of philosophical and theological discourse behind them, from the Fathers of the Church to Sartre and Heidegger.4 Yet the experience of Simon Strebnik and the survivor of "Traces" resists conceptualization. Made to confront and identify the deceptive, self negating empty stage of the theater of death, they can only look, perceive, and assert its placeness. They can only see the spatial materiality of an index with an abyss at its center; a setting delineating an excruciatingly long but fleeting moment of dying. I This collection of essays is about narrative as a way of thinking. Trauma, by expert definition, is anything but a way of thinking. However, for narrators and characters, as well as for readers and writers, narrative is not merely a way of thinking—it may be a way of perceiving, of remembering, and perhaps, above all, of (re)experiencing living and dying. For writers, it may be a way of surviving, even; for some "surviving" writers—a way of speaking the truth of an experience of "not being," of becoming "nothing." For apart from the many psychological needs to narrate, apart from the inner urgency to shape experience for whatever reason or purpose, some writers have expressed their conviction that fictional narrative is the only way through which the truth of an ineffable "negative" reality, which otherwise eludes comprehension, may be apprehended and transmitted. Fiction, for them, becomes reliable testimony. At least, this is what Jorge Semprún felt when writing of his experience in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald in the form of a fictional autobiography: "Only the [End Page 206] artifice of a masterly narrative will prove capable of conveying the truth of the testimony . . . would help reality to seem real, and truth to be believable" (Suleiman 4). Like Semprún in his autobiographical texts, Ida Fink, the Israeli-Polish writer, aspires in her stories to convince us of the reality of the inconceivable, and to "narrow the fissure between the truth of experience and its literary representation" (Wilczinski 27). Even if fictional, it is all real: "Everything...

Staging Memory and Trauma in French and Italian Holocaust Film

Reading Memory in French Documentary and Italian Fiction Film The lapses of trauma are conjoined with tendency compulsively to repeat, relive, be possessed by, or act out traumatic scenes of past ... In this sense, what is denied or repressed in a lapse of does not disappear; it returns in a transformed, at times disfigured and disguised manner. (10) --Dominick LaCapra History and Memory after Auschwitz This essay is about enactment of and trauma in !our films on Holocaust, two French documentaries--Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1984)--and two Italian fiction films--Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful (1997) and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1973). A comparison between French and Italian Holocaust cinema is not an obvious one in that filmmakers from both countries have approached subject in quite disparate fashions. In such films as Shoah, Night and Fog, The Sorrow and Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969), Weapons of Spirit (Pierre Sauvage, 1988) and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophuls, 1988), France is well-known for its documentary treatment of Shoah, representing at times banal or bureaucratic side of evil. (1) Italian directors, however, have produced various fiction films centered on grey areas of survival. This is case of Kapo (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1959), Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller, 1976), The Night Porter and The Damned (Luchino Visconti, 1969), in which survival is often connected with sexual deviance. (2) Despite their apparent differences, both genres deal profoundly with staging trauma and memory; that is, representing protagonists who relive past event, thereby accentuating impossible gap between narrative present and past. In History and Memory after Auschwitz Dominick LaCapra discusses sites--Pierre Nora's well known lieux de memoire--in terms of their connection to trauma. LaCapra contends that sites are usually also trauma sites, and degree to which trauma affects individual is marked by the extent to which has not been effective in coming to terms with [trauma], notably through modes of mourning (10). Mourning, however, came with difficulty, as post-war European society appeared to obtain a certain mask of normality. The economic booms all over Europe were of course one crucial factor in these delayed reactions to Holocaust experiences. Many survivors, it seemed, were not ready to enter into trying course of remembering, reliving and commemorating their pasts. Memory came later, and, as argued by Henry Rousso in The Haunting Past: History, Memory and Justice in Contemporary France, we are now living in an age of memory as relationship with painful past has been repeatedly fore-grounded in survivor's accounts, fictional films and novels, historical works, and so on. The basic premise of this article is that, in these four films, remembering Holocaust recalls original trauma, as wound is by no means healed. Trauma does not belong exclusively to past, and these films make explicit how trauma perpetually re-represents itself in present. Dori Laub in Bearing Witness, or Vicissitudes of Listening discusses incomplete nature of traumatic response. She argues that, as event never came to completion, survivors perpetually live with truncated versions of their past, and for survivors, trauma continues into present and is current in every respect (69). Traumatic response is also connected to how several characters or interviewees in these films assess their own survival in that many, both historical (Shoah) and fictional (Life is Beautiful and The Night Porter), have yet to come to terms with machinations of their continued existence. Cathy Caruth points out a critical parallel between trauma and survival in introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory. …

Witnessing for the Witness: Choice and Destiny by Tsipi Reibenbach

This last decade has been defined as "the Age of Testimony," mainly in the wake of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and the wealth of responses it has elicited. In every country where the Holocaust survivors found a shelter, films are produced by the second and even the third generation of the "Aftermath." Designated as "witnesses by the imagination" or "surrogate witnesses," they attempt to tacitly refute Paul Celan's desperate assessment in his poem "Aschenglorie": "Nobody/witnesses/ for the witness." These testimonial films have been prompted by the same urge: the Negationist scheme regarding the Shoah and the vulnerable condition of the aging eye-witnesses. These works summon the existence of a specific testimonial pact that provides a space of transference between survivor and interviewer and implies a particular quality of listening and empathy. Such is Tsipi Reibenbach's outstanding Choice and Destiny, the first part of her familial trilogy.

The garden in the machine: a field guide to independent films about place

Introduction 1. The Garden in the Machine Larry Gottheim's Fog Line, Thomas Cole's The Oxbow, J.{ths}J. Murphy's Sky Blue Water Light Sign, Panoramas 2. Voyages of Life Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life, Larry Gottheim's Horizons 3. Avant-Gardens Kenneth Anger's Eaux d'artifice, Marie Menken's Glimpse of the Garden, Carolee Schneemann's Fuses, Stan Brakhage's The Garden of Earthly Delights, Marjorie Keller's The Answering Furrow, Anne Charlotte Robertson's Melon Patches, Or Reasons to Go on Living, Rose Lowder's Ecological Cinema 4. Re-envisioning the American West Babette Mangolte's The Sky on Location, James Benning's North on Evers, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Ellen Spiro's Roam Sweet Home 5. From the Sublime to the Vernacular Jan DeBont's Twister and George Kuchar's Weather Diaries 6. The City as Motion Picture The New York City Symphony: Rudy Burckhardt's New York Films, Weegee's Weegee's New York, Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y., Marie Menken's Go! Go! Go! Hilary Harris's Organism, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing Panorama, the San Francisco City Film: Frank Stauffacher's Sausalito and Notes on the Port of St. Francis, Bruce Baillie's Castro Street, Michael Rudnick's Panorama, Ernie Gehr's Eureka and Side/Walk/Shuttle Coda--Deconstruction/Reconstruction: Pat O'Neill's Water and Power and Eugene Martin's Invisible Cities 7. The Country in the City Central Park, Jonas Mekas's Walden, William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One 8. Rural (and Urban) Hours Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma, Robert Huot's One Year and Rolls 1971, Nathaniel Dorsky's Hours for Jerome, Peter Hutton's Landscape (for Manon) and New York Portrait, Part I 9. Expulsion from the Garden Thomas Cole's The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, Carl Franklin's One False Move, J.{ths}J. Murphy's Print Generation and Horicon 10. Satan's National Park Bruce Conner's Crossroads, Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, James Benning's Deseret and Four Corners 11. Benedictions/New Frontiers Chick Strand's Kristallnacht, Stan Brakhage's Commingled Containers, Andrew Noren's Imaginary Light, Leighton Pierce's 50 Feet of String, David Gatten's What the Water Said, nos. 1-3 Appendix: Distribution Sources for Films and Videos Notes Index

The Rites of Responsibility: The Cinematic Rhetoric of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985)

Geller | The Rites of Responsibility: The Cinematic Rhetoric of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) The Rites of Responsibility: The Cinematic Rhetoric of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) Jay Geller Vanderbilt University Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's extraordinary "documentary" of the Holocaust, consists of interviews with surviving victims, bystanders, and perpetrators as well as visits to the killing fields as they exist today. The film is known, however, almost as much for its length of nine-and-a-half hours as it is for its content. In making Shoah, Lanzmann and his crew shot more than 350 hours offilm over aperiod ofsome fouryears. Even limiting the project to this vast sum of film required extensive planning and selection . After another five years of effort, the film was edited down to its final screening time. Lanzmann admits that some of that original footage consisted of setting up scenes and botched shots that were easily excised, but that much "magnificent work" also found its way to the cutting room floor.1 How did the director and the editors, Ziva Postee and Anna Ruiz, choose what and what not to show on the screen? Among the scenes removed were interviews with several members of the Polish resistance (as well as with additional Warsaw ghetto fighters); Lanzmann has justified their exclusion by arguing that they did not have sufficient filmic presence.2 Inclusion was guided, Lanzmann states in his Cahiers du Cinéma interview, by how well a scene comported with his idea of the film's "general architecture"—the exact nature of which he never explicates .3 He has also discussed how he structured the section devoted to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz about the themes ofknowledge/ignorance, deception, and resistance. Yet the problematic which Lanzmann repeatedly returns to in his own commentaries on his film—as well as echoed in much of the critical literature, especially the work of Shoshana Felman—is witness: the problematic ofwitnessing an event whose telos was to eliminate all witness.4 The film neither illustrates nor mimetically represents that which was to have been witnessed: there is no archival footage, no docudramatics. Nor does it function merely to transmit the witness of others, of those interviewed; rather it itself acts like a witness. The film bears witness; it testifies for the dead, for those whom Primo Levi called the true witnesses of the Holocaust.5 It attempts to incarnate them, to bring them back alive. The film bears witness, because the Shoah, like all traumatic experiences, was never actually witnessed as such—nor was it ever integrated into the memory, history, or life-experience ofmodem Euro-Americans.6 Further, the Shoah as an event could not be experienced by any one individual since by its very nature it was experienced from incommensurable perspectival positions: those who see but do not understand (victims), who see but overlook (bystanders), who see but try to hide/render invisible (perpetrators). The film acts out the trauma by bringing these witnesses together—and those oftwo others, the filmmaker/ narrator/interviewer/inquirer Lanzmann and his alter-ego, the historian Raul Hilberg—before the audience. The film would make each member of the audience bear witness. Yet the bystanders, too, bore witness. In the Cahiers du Cinema interview Lanzmann refers to the Poles as the "les témoins," the witnesses.7 How do the filmgoers then not become like these bystanders? There is no natural and necessary relationship between knowledge and action, between knowledge and responsibility for that knowledge. Moreover, since the audience experiences the montage of witness in time, its members do not have a synchronic tableau (neither vivant nor mort) before them; they can assume no godlike perches from which each can observe the clash of testimony, watch the false testimony discorroborated. Rather the film educates its audience about how to become a certain kind of witness. Since it is the individual who belies the attempt to erase, who becomes the exception that proves and subverts the rule of silence, so, like the individual survivors whose testimony is heard, the viewers are to become such individuals. The film's heuristic principle derives from an aspect of Lanzmann's background that seems to have...

A Response to Dominick LaCapra's "Lanzmann's Shoah"

Previous articleNext article No AccessCritical ResponseA Response to Dominick LaCapra's "Lanzmann's Shoah"Ora GelleyOra Gelley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 24, Number 3Spring, 1998 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448895 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright 1998 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film

Research Article| January 01 1997 Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film Margaret Olin Margaret Olin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1997) 57: 1–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928661 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Margaret Olin; Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film. Representations 1 January 1997; 57 1–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2928661 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997 The Regents of the University of California. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film

Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film

The politics of cruelty: an essay on the literature of political imprisonment

In Kate Millett's brilliant new book, her most important since the ground-breaking Sexual Politics, a work which forever changed our understanding of the interdependence of the political and the personal. Now in The Politics of Cruelty she sets out a new theory of politics for our time and offers a harrowing view of the modern state based on the practice of torture as a method of rule, as conscious policy. In assuming the power of torture over its citizens, government has made itself omnipotent, threatening the social and political progress of centuries. In many places throughout the world, the individual is faced with monumental force; fear of the state has become the condition of our time. Millett analyzes that fear through the rich literature of its expression, a mixture of literary text, the reports of witnesses, legal theory, and historical account. Included are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece, The First Circle; Claude Lanzmann's Shoah; Mark Mathabane's Kaffir Roy; and Radha Bharadwaj's film, Closet Land. But it is the literary version of experience which prevails and persuades with the greatest effect: the reality of the victim; the social and psychological climate of life under dictatorship; the moment of arrest, capture; the moment when one falls down the rabbit hole and disappears; that pivotal electronic second, after which nothing is ever the same. And there is no going back...

The 1988 Southam Lecture: The Texts of War and the Discourse of Peace

Credibility, the central concept of communication theory and implicit in all its paradigms, is best understood by examining its limits; that is, the denial of reality. Two cases are studied here: the European holocuast and Vietnam revisionism. former is framed by two documentary films, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah; the latter by the CBS TV special The Uncounted Enemy. A worst case scenario suggests that Vietnam revisionism is part of a larger strategy to persuade a public that a nuclear war is winnable. Current coverage of the Middle East is seen as an example of World War I11 being seen through the eyes of World War I1 as journalists and other interpreters are unable to transcend their own occupational subculture and experience in covering foreign policy leadership (The Diplomatic Correspondent syndrome) and military engagements (The Foreign Correspondent syndrome). Like Generals, journalists are always fighting the last war. Peace movements are represented as deviant and serve to enhance the credibility of war movements. They are like the images of women in the androcentric discourse of our dominant culture. Responsibility for an alternative peace discourse, then, rests with researchers whose methodology must become more communicative and participatory.