LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Claude Lanzmann
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At the heart of this extraordinary new documentary from Claude Lanzmann, director of SHOAH, is an interview the filmmaker conducted in 1979 with a Holocaust survivor about the uprising at a Nazi concentration camp. Invariably tough-minded and rigorous, Lanzmann draws from the man's memory, reconstructing the past with questions remarkable for their journalistic acuity and lack of sentimentalism, then sets the interview against images of modern Poland and models of the camp. Lanzmann originally slated the interview for Shoah but decided that the subject was too important to fold into the larger work. He was right. The new film isn't just an epilogue to that landmark documentary; it's a rebuttal to the dominant mythology of Jewish acquiescence and martyrdom, and as such, a critique of turning history into the comforts of fiction.
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Just as Claude Lanzmann emphasizes himself, the nine-and-a-half-hour film SHOAH is about the "radicalism of death". He accordingly composes the topic of extermination, although without using any form of archive material. Instead he questions victims, perpetrators and a so-called audience, linking their statements and faces with shots of the places in their present-day state. The observer must develop his own picture, what he imagines from what he sees and hears - or, more to the point, from what there is of no more to see.The director`s method of questioning ... deserve special attention which is borrowed from Sartresch psychoanalysis. With this aid, those being questioned are talked into not just relating situations, but into reliving them. The topics emphasized in the film are the exterminations in Auschwitz and Treblinka, Chelmo, the fate of the Czech family camp in Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto along with the bureaucratic process of the exterminations.
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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.
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Claude Lanzmann was born in Paris in 1925 and served in the French Resistance during World War II. He was a journalist for Sartre's newspaper Les Temps Modernes and became a filmmaker in 1970. He is extremely opposed to fictional films about the Holocaust, notably Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Lanzmann's first Holocaust documentary, Shoah is a landmark on the subject and took eleven years to make. The final cut was more than nine hours long.
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Claude Lanzmann, who has said that he considers himself and Raul Hilberg the only people who understand how to represent the Holocaust, described Littell's novel as nothing less than "a poisonous flower of evil" in Le Journal de Dimanche. "In spite of the best efforts of the author," he goes on to say, "these 900 stormy pages are completely unconvincing.... The book as a whole is simply a scene setter and Littell's fascination for the villain, for horror, for the extremes of sexual perversion, work entirely against his story and his character, inspiring discomfort and repulsion, even though it's hard to say against who or what...." Le Nouvel Observateur considered Lanzmann's remarks "moderate." God save anyone who gets a bad review from him.
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Lanzmann constructed this extraordinarily complex and powerful documentary around an interview he conducted with Maurice Rossel in 1979 during the shooting of Shoah. Hoping to escape the boredom of army service as a border-guard, young Rossel asked an old friend to help him sign up as an International Red Cross representative in Berlin during WWII. The main task of such representatives was to visit POW camps, guarantee the observance of the Geneva Convention and insure the delivery of packages. Yet, in 1943, Maurice Rossel was the only International Red Cross representative to go to Auschwitz, when it was working at maximum efficiency as a death camp. He witnessed no horrors-except for skeletal prisoners who gazed at him as "a visitor from the living"-and enjoyed a pleasant half-hour chat with the "elegant" camp commander before taking his leave. Rossel ... headed the Red Cross delegation in June 1944 to inspect the "model ghetto" at Theresienstadt.
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Claude Lanzmann