Claude Lanzmann Retrospective
Organized in cooperation with the Jewish Community of Prague,
the Jewish Museum in Prague, and the Embassy of France in the Czech Republic

CLAUDE LANZMANN (1925)

Best known for his monumental epic of documentary art, the nine-and-a-half-hour-long Shoah, Claude Lanzmann is perhaps the leading living French filmmaker and among the most important documentary filmmakers at work today. After the Second World War, during which he was an active member of the French Resistance, Lanzmann began his career in the arts as a writer, serving for a time with Jean-Paul Sartre on the editorial board of the influential journal Les Temps Modernes. His career as a filmmaker began in 1973, with the release of his film Pourquoi Israel? The film is an in-depth, intimate look at the questions surrounding the birth of the Jewish state, told through the views and experiences of a diverse group of Israelis. From his first film and through each of his successive works, Lanzmann tirelessly and patiently pursues as an interviewer and chronicler the raw authenticity and immediacy of testimony that has become the trademark of his craft.

In 1974, Lanzmann began work on his monumental opus, Shoah (1985), perhaps the most ambitious project to attempt to understand the Holocaust ever undertaken. The film contains no archival materials: it consists solely of the living testimonies of concentration camp survivors, their Nazi executioners, and the passive collaborators who lived and worked near the camps. Through this technique, Lanzmann enables the viewer to experience a reality to the Holocaust that newsreel footage can never convey - the emotional immediacy brought to the surface through the countless stories of survival and denial that his camera records.

After completion of this epic work, Lanzmann embarked on two other films that can be considered as Shoah supplements: Tsahal (1994), a controversial look at the Israeli Defense Forces and a kind of anti-Shoah, and A Visitor from the Living (1997), in which his inimitable technique of cross-examination and persistence exposes the shocking story of a Red Cross official who was allowed access to Nazi concentration camps in 1943-44 and submitted false reports on the lack of evidence of any crimes. In his latest film, Sobibor, October 14, 1943 at 4:00 pm (2001), Lanzmann again employs his signature techniques of interview mixed with mediative footage of contemporary sites, but this time to reveal not the stories of victim and oppressor, but of heroics and the fight for life and freedom. Told through the eyes of a single survivor, the film recounts a mass escape, in 1943, of Jewish inmates from the Sobibor death camp in Poland.

Lanzmann's work is testimony to the power and importance of oral histroy and film's unique ability to capture not only the words but the emotions behind what the subjects say. Throughout his career, he has devoted himself to one underlying idea: that truth lies in the unmasking. And from this, his films bear out the moral position that each individual is responsible as an individual for what he or she does. Lanzmann has spent years traveling the world, searching for those to tell not only their stories, but the stories of the dead; for bystanders and witnesses to unimaginable horror; and for the perpetrators of these horrors, using any means he could - hidden cameras, false identities - whatever it would take to get at the truth. Lanzmann's films bear witness for the past, reflect for us a vision of the present, and offer stark warnings about the possibilities the future might hold.

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Why Israel? (Pourquoi Israël?)
Claude Lanzmann / Francie / 1973 / 195 min / 35 mm
The author describes his film as "subjective reportage" divided into three parts. In the first, Israel is explored by the wandering eyes of new immigrants who are happy to be included in the Jewish community. The next sequence presents a more critical view - of Israelis who try to understand to what extent their own community is successful. The third part depicts the speculations of Israelis proud of their accomplishments, but who are also painfully aware of their societies failings and the challenges they face in the building of their new state.

Shoah
Claude Lanzmann / Francie / 1985 / 566 min / 35 mm
"Shoah" in Hebrew means chaos or extermination, and it is the name Jews have given to the Holocaust. In his seminal work, Lanzmann does not ask why, he asks how. The fundamentally basic question: How was it possible for the Holocaust to have happened? Shot without the use of any historical footage, Lanzmann works only with eyewitnesses and contemporary images of the death camps and their surroundings. Grass grows over the mass graves: the camps look today like decrepit, unused factories. But the power of testimony is revealed in words: For eight years Lanzmann tirelessly pursued interviews with people whose lives were indelibly affected by the Holocaust: survivors, murders, people who were caught in between. Lanzmann weaves their stories together into an unparalleled mosaic of memory. Shoah is unrivalled in its impact and in the immediacy it brings to the power of film to bear witness, in the process assembling some notion of sense to what in the end remains fundamentally senseless. Who are these people Lanzmann captures in words and on film? Were they simply ordinary people trapped in the web of extraordinary times?

Tsahal
Claude Lanzmann / Francie / 1994 / 316 min
The film is both a follow-up to and an antithesis of Shoah. This time, Lanzmann focuses on the fighting spirit of the Israeli people and on the high price that unending conflict with their Arab neighbors has exacted from them. The film begins with an exploration of the sacrifice and loss Israel suffered during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In the second part of the film, the scene shifts to deal with the controversial Israeli intervention in Lebanon, the demoralizing effect this had in the Gaza, and on the increasingly adverse effects of militarism on Israeli society. Lanzmann weaves together a mosaic of testimonies and reactions, from soldiers and their superior officers to zealous West Bank settlers. Lanzmann juxtaposes these testimonies with images of the lands conquered by Israel since 1973 - green valleys interspersed with the scorched earth damaged by war. Throughout the film, and always just behind the surface of Israeli military conflicts, the shadow of the Holocaust looms. A people with fresh memories of the threat of their total annihilation now must face their new position at war with their neighbors as they seek - but at what cost? - peace.

A Visitor from the Living (Un vivant qui passe / A Visitor from the Living)
Claude Lanzmann / Francie / 1997 / 65 min / Beta
Edited from footage originally shot during the making of Shoah, in this film Lanzmann cross-examines Maurice Rossel, the only member of the International Red Cross during WWII allowed access to Nazi concentration camps (Auschwitz and Theriesenstadt). Rossel infamously submitted reports stating that he had seen no evidence whatsoever of the "alleged" atrocities being committed by the Nazi's - and this during 1943 and 1944, when the Nazis were attempting to fully implement their Final Solution of the extermination of the Jews. Lanzmann is superb in his questioning technique, circling Rossel, polite but insistent, and in this way is able to capture on film straight statements made by Rossel, with the cool air of a lifelong bureaucrat, that almost defy imagination: "Do you regret your report?" the director asks Rossel. "I could not write a different one. I would sign it again today," Rossel replies. "Even after you know now what happened?" "Of course." A bluntly powerful film in which Lanzmann, among many other insights, reveals the hidden secret behind such incarnations of evil as Nazi Germany: the strange truth that the Holocaust happened, and can happen again, in a world full of seemingly "decent" and "normal" people.

Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4:00 pm (Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures / Sobibor, 14 October 1943, 4 p.m.)
Claude Lanzmann / Francie / 2001 / 95 min / 35 mm
An unsentimental celebration of human courage during the Holocaust, this gripping story of the only successful mass escape by Jews from a Nazi concentration camp is told through the eyes of a single survivor, Yehuda Lerner. He relates on film in gripping detail how the plot came to unfold, and how in the end it was the very punctuality of the Nazi guards that contributed greatly to their success. A complex plan was set into motion at precisely 4:00 p.m., when the uprising of over 600 prisoners began, armed with knives. When it was over, most of the guards lay dead, and over 300 people had made it into forest just beyond the camp. Though historians think that as few as 60 were not later recaptured and shot, this in no way diminishes the impact of Lerner's story, of the stupendous effort of the prisoners against their German captors. After the escape, the Nazi's closed the camp and tried to erase any reference to it in historical records. In this immediate, first-person film, Lanzmann employs a minimum of film technique, interspersing extended shots of Lerner speaking (the second half of the film is almost entirely comprised of close-ups) with austere, meditative footage of contemporary Poland and the site of the Sobibor camp today, not far from Warsaw. For all its captivating drama, Lanzmann's film is much more than the retelling of an heroic revolt. As the filmmaker himself explains, "There is a strong parentage between Yehuda Lerner's story and Tsahal. I wanted to show how this man, who is profoundly non-violent, moves into violence. It is mythological, this film. It's like David and Goliath."