The Dictatorship of
Imbecility
Claude Lanzmann and 'Shoah'
Reviewed by Serge Thion (bio)
Once again, in his typically heavy-handed way, occasional film
director Claude Lanzmann has made another flabbergasting admission.
Speaking of his movie "Shoah," he said to the Paris daily Le Monde
(June 12, 1997): "Not understanding has been my iron law."
Several years ago, while speaking of Spielberg's "Schindler's
List," Lanzmann said that if he had found authentic pictures of
homicidal gas chambers, he would have destroyed them. What he
precisely said was this (Le Monde, March 3, 1994):
There is not one second of archival material in Shoah
because it is not the way I work or think, and besides it does not
exist.... If I had found an existing film -- a secret film because
that was forbidden -- shot by an SS and showing how 3,000 Jews,
men, women and children, were dying together, asphyxiated in the
gas chamber of Krema 2 in Auschwitz, not only would I have not
shown it, but I would have destroyed it. I cannot say why. It goes
by itself.
Such a remark should astonish only those who still don't realize
that Lanzmann is deranged. Fortunately, he could never find such a
film because his nightmare is just a dream. (An official at Israel's
Yad Vashem Holocaust center pretends that such a film exists, hidden
deep in the center's archives. But nobody has ever seen it. As usual
the proof lies in the invisibility of the proof.)(note)
During the war young Claude spent a very happy boyhood in a French
village while his parents were hiding away from the Vichy and Nazi
threat. The entire family survived. Much later he developed a sense
of guilt about those happy years. During the fifties he was
introduced to the circle of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
by his sister, who was one of Sartre's mistresses (and who later
committed suicide). In an expression of symmetry, he became
Beauvoir's lover, and thus anchored himself to this small but
intellectually powerful clique.(note)
Unfortunately Claude Lanzmann has only a limited command of
language. His most convincing arguments have always been, in his
view, his fists and his genitals, the size of which he is prone to
allude to -- even suggesting to skeptical ladies that they check for
themselves. In rhetorical ability he is overshadowed by his elder
brother, Jacques, who is a very successful novelist, and against whom
Claude has developed a rabid jealousy. Left with his limited
abilities, Claude had an obscure career as a proof-reading journalist
with the popular press. Several times he tried to write articles for
Les Temps Modernes, Sartre's monthly review, but he could never get
further than five or six pages.
As a filmmaker Lanzmann found a solution to this deficiency, which
permits one to manipulate images in ways that are not possible with
written and spoken arguments. His first film, released in 1973, was a
documentary about Israel. He knew nothing of the country, and the
film reveals his ambivalent feelings. He could not understand or
approve of many facets of Israeli life, but at the same time he found
a new framework through which he could express his singular violence,
ambitions and desire for recognition. He also discovered that Israel
was the place where the money was.
This money was needed for his "Shoah" project. In 1977 he managed
to convince Israeli Prime Minister Begin to contribute $850,000 in
Israel government funds to this project, which Begin saw as "a Jewish
national interest." Additional funds were made available from
non-government Israeli sources, and from the French
government.(note)
Lanzmann conceived the film as another documentary. These days he
expresses contempt for knowledge, and says he disapproves of
scholarly research because it implies a comparative approach that is
at odds with what he calls the "uniqueness of the shoah" (Hebrew for
catastrophe). But back then he had to learn from the ground up, and
to meet with scholars. He said that at the start of the project, in
1974, he "spent months in Yad Vashem." He began by producing a rather
conventional film.
We know this because when the Faurisson affair began in 1979, his
film was not far from completion. We had inside knowledge of this at
the time. Nadine Fresco, a failed historian who was with him during
his filming in Poland and elsewhere, dutifully reported to us about
the progress that was being made. Also, I had undetected spies on the
editorial staff of Les Temps Modernes. In addition, I was seeing
Lanzmann myself at the time, because I had been asked to help
organize and write articles on Indochina for a special issue of this
journal.(note)
The Faurisson affair was in itself a new catastrophe for Lanzmann
because it showed that all the main documents on which he was relying
were open to question. The columns of the temple were shaking. His
mentor, Raul Hilberg, and Fresco as well, probably pointed this out
to him at the time. The endless hours of pictures of trains and
locomotives are directly inspired by railroad-addict Hilberg, who
mentions this in a recent book.(note)
This is how "Shoah" viewers have been railroaded.
Lanzmann's film was thus almost destroyed by revisionist critique
even before it was issued. He had only one way out: abandon documents
altogether, and make a different film. Plunge into irrationality,
play on memory as opposed to history, and set primitive gut feelings
against understanding. That's why he can now say "not understanding
has been my iron law". Kill one bird with many stones. The biggest
difficulty was to return to Israel to beg for money, once again
playing the schnorrer. But the funds for propaganda there are
unlimited, it seems, and he got the gelt all right.
A new concept of the film emerged: lengthy interviews, sliced into
small parcels, sprinkled throughout an endless,
nine-and-a-half-hour-long saga. That's a sure recipe for confusing
and completely numbing, if not putting to sleep, anyone with no
special training in the history and geography of the Second World War
and of Poland. Actually, over more than ten years Lanzmann had
acquired a good understanding of the historical questions, and has
shown a consummate art of slaloming between them.
In the recent Le Monde interview (June 12, 1997), he was asked
about his film's "form": "Of course, it is essential. 'Shoah' is a
very complex narrative construction, built on circles and recurrence,
sometimes four hours into the story ..." If the film honestly
presented the interviews one after the other, complete and uncut, the
entire pyramid would crumble into absurdity. "Shoah" is also
stultifying because few of its viewers understand Polish (badly
translated, specialists say), and because viewers cannot compare what
was said two hours earlier with what was said five hours
earlier.(note) But for the revisionist
who knows the basic material, "Shoah" is particularly unimpressive
because of the way it makes use of blatantly false testimonies. This
has already been amply demonstrated.(note)
Perhaps the revisionists should apologize to Lanzmann for the
inconvenience they caused him by ruining his original plans, and
pushing him to instead produce this mammothly boring cinematic
work.
In general, the film's reception has been quite cool. It's been a
complete commercial failure in the United States. While it has been
shown on several German and eastern European television networks,
France remains the place where Lanzmann, fully supported by the
Socialist governments, has made the greatest inroads. A small clique
of drummers kept the "Paris intelligentsia" in a state of mute
reverence.
When Lanzmann later produced his third film in what he said was a
trilogy, Israel-centered production entitled "Tsahal," silence and
consternation prevailed. All the suppressed fascist components of his
sick personality emerged: uncritical acceptance of ultra-nationalist
Zionist myths, adoration for military force, homosexual-masochistic
admiration for young "warriors," acceptance of torture and death as
proper means of imposing Jewish power, and so forth.
Fortunately opinion-makers know how to forget and dispense with
memory when it becomes undesirable. It now seems that "Tsahal" never
existed. Nobody dares say the king has no clothes, that Lanzmann is
an imbecile and a dictator -- even though his own public statements
remove any ambiguity on this point.
Notes
- Statement by Ephraim Kaye, described as
"director of seminars for educators from abroad at Yad Vashem in
Israel," Northern California Jewish Bulletin, April 18, 1997.
- More on the Lanzmann crowd can be found in the
first chapter of my book Une Allumette sur la banquise (1993), now
accessible (in French) on the Internet web site:
http://www.abbc.net/aaargh/fran/histo/STasb1.1.html
- "Report 'Shoah' Got Grant from Israel," The
Jewish Journal (New York City), June 27, 1986, p. 3; "Lanzmann
& 'Shoah'," The Washington Post, November 20, 1985, p.
B4.
- "Indochine: Guerre des socialismes et mort des
peuples," Les Temps Modernes, Issue No. 402, January 1980.
- Hilberg's claim is to be found in The Politics
of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, a very funny book
published by Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, 1996), p. 40.
- Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the
Holocaust: The Complete Text of the Film (with a preface by Simone
de Beauvoir). New York: Pantheon, 1985, and, New York: DaCapo,
1996.
- See, for example: Bradley Smith, "Shoah: Abraham
Bomba, the Barber," The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1986,
pp. 244-253; Robert Faurisson, "Shoah" (review of the film), The
Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1988, pp. 85-92; Theodore J.
O'Keefe, "Shoah" (review of the book), The Journal of Historical
Review, Spring 1988, pp. 92-95.
Author bio
Serge Thion, born in 1942, has
devoted some 30 years to study, analysis and writing on social,
economic and political issues, particularly in agrarian societies. He
received a doctorate in sociology from the Paris Sorbonne in 1967. He
is the author of numerous scholarly articles, half of them dealing
with Southeast Asia, and several books, including
Vérité historique ou vérité politique?
(in collaboration with Robert Faurisson). A Serge Thion archive is
being assembled at: http://www.abbc.net/totus
His essay on the work of Jean-Claude Pressac, "A French Scholar
Responds to a Widely Acclaimed Anti-Revisionist Work About
Auschwitz," was published in the July-August 1994 Journal of
Historical Review.
Article was published by
Institute For Historical Review
