Shoah is the most rigorous act of witness in cinema history. The question it could not ask was: witness to what, and at whose cost?
The first image is a man in a boat on a Polish river, singing. It is 1978, or thereabouts. Simon Srebnik is fifty-odd years old, and the river is the Ner, and the trees on either bank have been here since before anything that happened here happened. He was brought back to this river by a French filmmaker who asked him to sing the songs he sang as a boy, when the Germans made him row on the same water and sing for their entertainment. He sang then because it kept him alive. He sings now because he was asked to. The camera watches from the bank, unhurried, as if what it is watching is simply a man in a boat on a river in Poland, which is both entirely true and almost unbearable to state.
This is the first image of Shoah.
| Director | Claude Lanzmann |
|---|---|
| Year | 1985 |
| Runtime | 566 minutes (9 hours 26 minutes) |
| Cast | Documentary; survivors, perpetrators, bystanders |
| Award | BAFTA for Best Documentary; César for Best Film |
| Streaming | MUBI, Criterion Channel |
Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) was filmed over eleven years across Poland, Israel, Germany, and the United States. It runs nine hours and twenty-six minutes. It contains no archival footage: no photographs of the camps, no images from the liberation, no footage of the dead. What it contains instead is faces, speaking, in the present tense — survivors, perpetrators, bystanders — returned when possible to the specific fields, railway depots, and village squares where what happened happened. Lanzmann’s conviction was absolute and declared: to show the archive was not to bear witness but to provide the viewer with a screen, an image behind which the event itself could remain unconfronted. The photograph of a corpse is not the corpse. The film of Auschwitz is not Auschwitz. The honest response was to remove every image except the face of someone who was there, speaking now, with everything that surviving and remembering and returning to the place has done to that face. The film won the BAFTA for best documentary and the César for best film. It is, by almost universal critical agreement, the defining cinematic confrontation with the Holocaust and perhaps the most serious formal argument in documentary history about what responsible representation is permitted to show.
The previous review on this blog called Shoah “a long, patient, devastating answer” to Resnais’s assumption that the eye can be educated to see catastrophe. That was accurate as far as it went. What it did not say — what the Hiroshima review could not say, because Shoah was its destination rather than its subject — is that Lanzmann’s formal purity conceals a directorial method of extraordinary pressure, and that the film’s argument about the ethics of representation never turns to examine the ethics of its own production. Shoah knows precisely why it refuses the archive. It does not ask what it does to the people it asks to testify instead.
The evidence is in the film’s most famous scene. Abraham Bomba was a barber at Treblinka. Lanzmann asked him to give his testimony in a Tel Aviv barbershop — an actual working barbershop — cutting a customer’s hair while speaking. He set this up deliberately: the reconstruction of the act inside the act, the hands doing what they did, the scissors moving, the cape around the customer’s shoulders. Bomba speaks for several minutes about cutting hair in the gas chamber anteroom, about the moment he recognised a woman he knew from his town, about what passed between them. Then he stops. The sentence ends without ending. His face does something that the camera stays with in close-up. He says: “I can’t. It’s too hard. I can’t do it.” Lanzmann’s voice comes from off-camera, quiet and without hesitation: “We have to do it. I know it’s very hard. Go on, Abe. You must go on.”
We have to do it. The film never asks who is included in that pronoun. Bomba has to carry the memory because it is inside him and no act of will removes it. Lanzmann has to have the scene because without it the film’s argument — that testimony, returned to the conditions of the event, can deliver what the archive cannot — is a theory without proof. These are not the same obligation. The film treats them as interchangeable. It hears “we” and does not pause to distinguish between the survivor’s necessity and the filmmaker’s. The restraint of Lanzmann’s method — no archive, no reconstruction, no music, no narration — exists alongside a willingness to place a man back inside the chamber of his own trauma and say: go on. The formal purity and the human pressure coexist in every frame of the film. Only the first is ever examined. The second is treated as self-evidently justified by the subject matter. Perhaps it is. But the film that makes the most exacting argument in cinema about what we are and are not permitted to show about mass death never once turns that exaction on itself.
Lanzmann scrutinises everyone. The camera never turns on Lanzmann. This is the one testimony the film declines to produce.
The second thing the film cannot see is located in a single scene, and it is the most quietly devastating moment in nine and a half hours of cinema that is never less than devastating. Jan Karski was a Polish courier and underground operative who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, made his way to London and then Washington, and met with Anthony Eden, Felix Frankfurter, and Franklin Roosevelt. He told them exactly what was happening. He was specific, documented, firsthand. Frankfurter, the Supreme Court Justice, said afterward that he did not disbelieve Karski — he simply found himself unable to believe. Roosevelt listened and redirected the conversation to his horse farm in Poland. Karski spent forty years after the war in silence about what he had witnessed and what had been done with that witnessing, and when Lanzmann finally found him in Washington and asked him to speak on camera, he agreed.
What follows is unlike any other testimony in the film. Karski is not a man trying to return to a place. He is a man returning to the moment he understood that telling the truth was not enough — that a witness, even a flawless one, even one with documents and specificity and the personal meeting with the most powerful men in the world, could be heard and not heard simultaneously. He begins to speak about what he saw in the Ghetto and stops. He says he cannot continue. He leaves the frame. The camera holds on the empty chair.
This is the only moment in Shoah where the wound is not located in the past. Every other testimony is about what happened. Karski’s is about the gap between what happened and what was done with the knowledge of it — the specific, permanent bewilderment of being a witness the world declined to act on. Every other witness in the film carries the memory of an event. Karski carries the memory of a failure of transmission, which is a different kind of unbearable, because it implicates not only the perpetrators but the entire structure of how knowledge moves between people and what the world does when it arrives. Lanzmann, who said “go on, Abe” to Bomba, sits in silence when Karski leaves the frame. He does not ask him to continue. He does not say “we have to do it.” He simply waits, and eventually Karski comes back.
In that silence, the film knows something it does not say. There is a category of witness more devastating than watching people die. It is watching the world choose not to know while you are standing in front of it, saying: look. The Bomba scene is about what memory does to the body. The Karski scene is about what testimony does when the audience has already decided. Shoah holds both, and in holding both says more than it knows how to name.
Alain Resnais made Night and Fog in 1956: thirty-two minutes, archival footage of the camps intercut with present-day colour footage of the empty grounds, Jean Cayrol’s narration asking whether the machinery will rise again. It is among the most formally serious short films in the history of documentary, and Lanzmann considered it insufficient — not dishonest, but insufficient, because the archive it used had been produced by the perpetrators for their own purposes, and to inherit those images uncritically was to accept the perpetrators’ frame. Night and Fog looks at what the Nazis photographed. Shoah asks what the Nazis could not photograph — the interior of a surviving body, the exact quality of a face returning to the field forty years later — and insists that this is where the witness lives. The argument between the two films is not about which is better. It is about what cinema is licensed to show, which is the argument European cinema has been having with itself since 1945 and has never finished.
Place Shoah beside Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, as this blog already has. Resnais believed representation was sufficient if the eye was adequately prepared. Lanzmann believed preparation was a form of evasion. The distance between those positions is the distance between a film that opens with photographs of burned skin and calls it witness, and a film that opens with a man singing in a boat and calls that witness instead — the living face, the returning voice, the body that carries the past inside it and agrees, when asked, to go on.
Shoah is the most moral film ever made about an immoral event, and it is moral in a way that does not examine its own moral costs. It asks everything of everyone in it. It asks nothing of its own method. Whether that asymmetry is a flaw or simply the condition under which the film had to be made — under which nine and a half hours of testimony could be produced at all — is a question Lanzmann never put to himself on camera. He was the one person in the film who never had to answer. The film built a monument and stood outside it, and it did not know that this was also a
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956): thirty-two minutes and the film Shoah is in permanent argument with — Resnais used the archive Lanzmann refused, and the friction between these two approaches to the same event is the defining formal debate in postwar documentary cinema.
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012): a film that takes Lanzmann’s insight — that testimony must be produced, not simply recorded — to its most extreme and disturbing conclusion, asking Indonesian death squad leaders to re-enact their own killings in whatever cinematic genre they choose, and discovering that some performances reveal more truth than testimony ever could, and that some truths, once performed, cannot be contained.
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