What I know going in
That it’s a 9 hour holocaust documentary, something I’m not exactly looking forward to.
Immediate reaction
Shoah is a sustained, 9 hour long act of imagination. Not once during its epic, unwieldy runtime is actual footage from the Holocaust shown. There are no black and white reels of the allies busting into concentration camps, no photos of the Warsaw Ghetto, and no images the broken, gnarled bodies that have become so familiar to anyone born since. So what is shown? Lanzmann solely on what is, and what isn’t, left as a memory of the most tragic event of the 20th century. His camera roves around the grounds of camps that are now nothing but grass and few bricks, fixes itself to the trains and rails that carried so many people to their doom, and, most importantly, lingers on the faces of everyone involved, from the survivors, the observers, the rain conductors, and even the gaurads, as they recount their harrowing experiences in explicit, vivid detail.
Like My Dinner with Andrei, the stories told by the participants of Shoah are detailed enough to conjure up powerful images, albeit much more horrifying ones than Malle’s film inspires. The worry with every documentary is that it will tank an interesting subject with poor, un-cinematic execution. Given Shoah’smonumental topic, it’s not too hard to imagine a world where it exists as a History Channel-level, talking heads heavy documentary. Fortunately, Shoah remains visually engaging throughout its insane runtime. Lanzman will frequently overlap participant recollections over footage of the remains the various people talk about. A particular highlight of this technique comes when a survivor recounts how he was forced to spread the ashes of his friends after they had been executed and cremated. The film then cuts to an expansive wide-shot of the river in question at twilight as the camera seems to take on a life of its own and flies effortlessly over the ominous waters. Similarly, the film has a repeated, visual motif of a low angle shot progressing steadily along roads or railway tracks. During these moments, as the words of those involved blur into a horrifying swirl, the film takes on a threatening, hypnotic quality. Like if the shot was allowed to progress you would suddenly find yourself transported back in time to the period Shoah is obsessed with.
I would also like to go through a few personal revelations I had while viewing the film. Unfortunately, I know very little about the Holocaust, and WWII in general, and most of what I do know comes from half-remembered, middle school social studies lessons and Schindler’s List. The most shocking thing I learned was how the Nazi’s were able to keep knowledge of their crimes relatively secret. The film lays out how in the early days of the Nazi’s rule, very little information was given to anyone about the purpose of the Jewish ghettos or the myriad trains that were being used to transport frightened passengers. As someone who came of age during the Internet era, that fact is slightly unbelievable to me. If something on the scale of the Holocaust happened today, there is absolutely no way it wouldn’t be disseminated.
The second shock came from realizing that the Nazi’s took a very cold, scientific approach to mass extermination. Shoah is chock full of the tiny, mechanical details the Nazis had to grapple to make every work. It is also obsessed with the technology that was required to accomplish such a monumental task. From the huge trains, the fleet of vans and trucks, and to the gas chambers and incinerators, Shoah’sprobing of these locations is a haunting reminder of the chilly façade human catastrophe can sometimes take.
Alright, now for something completely different. I’ve noticed that with long, long films (over 3 hours) that I can never muster up the necessary attention span no matter how engaging the film is. With films like Satantango, Jeanne Dielman, and Shoah, I find that get the basic effect of the film after a normal runtime (2-2 ½ hours) and all the footage after that just feels completely unnecessary to me. This is surprisingly not a problem when I binge watch whole seasons of TV, mainly because my attention resets at the beginning with every episode. This issue mainly comes into play when a long film is designed as single, sustained experience, which Shoah is. Honestly, I think films of Shoah’slength would be much better served by a miniseries format. At the very least they should be broken up into smaller segments and have intermissions in between. I know all of that isn’t really great criticism, and plenty of people find Shoah and similarly lengthy films engaging for their entirety, but it’s personal flaw I’ve noticed that I feel like should be relayed so readers know why I have mixed feelings about all of the film’s mentioned.
Further thoughts
Calling a film “important” is a tricky thing. For one, the word has been overused, and, like most superlatives used in film writing, has lost its meaning. Additionally, the word is loaded and has multiple meanings. The word can mean important to only film history, important in the life of the viewer, or important culturally, as in actually provoking some larger change or preserving something significant. Shoah is one of the few films I would important (the third kind) with no hesitation. Without Lanzmann’s project, the oral testimony of a few dozen direct witnesses, and a few participants, to the horrors of the Holocaust would be lost to the historical ether. The fact that so many of the interviewees were at an advanced during the shooting of the film (the 70’s) speaks to the urgency to which the film needed to be made if it was ever going to exist. Additionally, the fact that so many of the film’s subjects are now gone give the film not only a haunting edge, but an extra layer of meaning. These people, and their stories, will live forever on celluloid due to Lanzmann’s actions, a potent reminder of the importance of film.
Finally, I want to talk about how crazy it is that the film even exists. Sifting through the various reviews, I discovered that Lanzmann spent about a decade doing research, tracking down subjects, filming, and editing. At various points in the film’s construction he was a razor’s edge away from losing funding. He had almost nothing to go on to try and find living witnesses. And when he did, he had to carefully cajole them into recounting their stories (in the case of the former Nazi’s, he had to use subterfuge and hidden camera to record them). What was meant to be a 2 ½ hour documentary sponsored by the State of Israel, ballooned to 350 hours of footage, which he spent year editing down to the comparatively svelte 9 ½ hour, 3 disc feature we have today.
I am truly surprised that the film didn’t end as a Thief and The Cobbler – style disaster. Something that was taken away from its creator, initially released in a compromised from, and then slowly reevaluated as bits and pieces of its original vision were slowly leaked over the years.
Why is the film on this list?
Shoah could have easily been a stale museum-piece, with an awkward-to-criticize clash between its historical and aesthetic importance. The fact that Shoah is an important document, and works so well as cinema is a miracle.
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