Wrestling with 'Shoah'

I admit to being kind of a weird kid growing up. For my 6th Grade social science project (you know, the thing with the trifold poster-board that you set up in the school cafeteria), I chose the Holocaust. For a 10th Grade high school elective, I again studied the Holocaust. Going to Hebrew School on Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, they were never shy about exploring—you guessed it—the Holocaust.

In my adulthood, I’ve gone back and forth about my feelings regarding the Holocaust. I believe it has taken far too central a place in the current Jewish mindset—but this centrality ballooned in response to a rising tide of anti-Semitism in the 1990s. (Many may not remember that films like Schindler’s List came about partly to answer louder anti-Semitic voices in the American mainstream in the late 80s/early 90s, like David Duke running for high office and the rise of various white nationalist militia groups.)

However, there are times where I feel like my complicated feelings about the Holocaust’s place in Jewish identity has made me pull too far away from any real exploration of it. Throughout my young adulthood, I often found myself grumbling “I get it.” (As a result, I was shortchanging myself a bit—and almost missed out on the terrific 2015 Hungarian drama Son of Saul.)

As I’ve worked to recalibrate my understanding of the Holocaust in Jewish life, I spent the lead-up to this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day finally buckling down and watching all 566 minutes of Claude Lanzmann’s acclaimed documentary Shoah. (“Shoah” is the Hebrew word for “catastrophe” but is now synonymous with the Holocaust.)

Released in 1985, Shoah currently sits at #27 on Sight & Sound’s 2022 poll of the greatest films of all-time. And yet, watching the film, I found myself constantly puzzled—not at the atrocities being described (on a macro level, Shoah didn’t offer me any kind of knowledge I hadn’t already learned in my previous studies), but at the choices Lanzmann made as a documentarian and what it says about the challenges of making a movie about real-life atrocities.

The Art of the Documentary

It’s tempting to view Shoah as a collection of testimonies. In his review, Roger Ebert says of the film, “It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness.” But that’s not accurate. It is a documentary. It’s consciously constructed as non-fiction filmmaking in which Lanzmann made distinct choices to go against the grain of prevailing documentary trends. To say it is an “act of witness” also overlooks the prevaricating or reluctance of some of his subjects. Some of the Jewish survivors interviewed in Shoah need to be prodded by Lanzmann to keep talking when they’re overcome with emotion. Bystanders attempt to play down their own involvement or awareness of what was happening at the death camps and in the ghettos. Perpetrators end up being forthright about their crimes only because Lanzmann was filming them without their knowledge. (I don’t feel bad for the perpetrators or think Lanzmann needed to be up front with them; I’m simply noting that people, especially guilty people, behave differently when they know they’re bring recorded.)

Watching Shoah unfold, I can understand the temptation to label it as something other than it is. Ebert calls it testimony. In his Criterion essay, Kent Jones calls it “the great epic poem of cinema.” But I feel like neither really gets at the heart of the film’s strengths or its weaknesses. The film being long doesn’t inherently make it “epic” (if anything, the film seems to consciously reject an epic sweep, consistently looking for the quiet and intimate contrasted against the intense, dehumanizing horrors described by those being interviewed). And while the film refrains from being a straightforward chronological narrative of the Nazis’ genocidal machinery, it’s still telling specific stories—the mobile gas vans at Chelmno; the death camps at Treblinka, the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the Warsaw ghetto.

To simply argue, as Jones does, that what Lanzmann seeks to convey is the “gestalt” of the Holocaust, misses the choices and simply allows its free flowing narrative not to overwhelm but to simply languish in a pile of tragedy. In his review, Ebert refers to Lanzmann’s approach as a “mosaic”—but even here, a mosaic is a collection of small pieces that form a larger shape. The larger shape of Shoah seems to be “there sure was a lot of death and suffering in the Holocaust”—and if that’s the “shape” of it, then we’re forced to ask: What does Lanzmann hope to leave with his viewer at the end of this experience, even if the film’s length and design is intended to convey that this tragedy hasn’t really “ended”?

If this notion of endless tragedy is the point of Shoah and Lanzmann’s goal is to show an ongoing psychic trauma on the world, he makes his point most eloquently when he juxtaposes testimonies against the now eerily serene settings where these atrocities occurred. But even here, the film stumbles a bit with Lanzmann’s approach to translation: Lanzmann will ask a question in French, his translator will repeat the question in a different language to the subject, they’ll respond in their native language, and the translator will relay back the answer in French. This method, applied inconsistently throughout the rest of the film’s interviews, once again leaves me asking: Why this choice, at this moment? What bigger picture is Lanzmann attempting to convey?

Another puzzling stand-out moment comes when he’s interviewing barber Abraham Bomba. The scene itself is a construction. In his New Yorker article “Witness,” Richard Brody notes, “Lanzmann got [Bomba] to borrow a chair in a working barbershop and pretend to cut a friend’s hair while telling the story—and Lanzmann maintains that, while cutting his friend’s hair, Bomba ‘became an actor.’” The construction goes further as Bomba, recounting how he would cut people’s hair before they went into the gas chamber (the victims believed they were having their hair cut as part of a delousing process), at one point wants to stop because the pain of reliving the trauma is too much. But Lanzmann pushes him onward. Perhaps there was an off-screen agreement where Bomba told Lanzmann, “Don’t let me stop once I start telling my story,” but I doubt it. It’s far more likely that Lanzmann, who found Bomba in the Bronx only to lose him for two years and rediscover him later in Tel Aviv, knew he had a compelling story and didn’t want to lose it.

Ebert notes the cruelty in Lanzmann’s demand, but then says, “Lanzmann is cruel, but he is correct. He must go on. It is necessary to make this record before all of those who were witnesses to the Holocaust have died.” That may be true, but that is not for us or Lanzmann to decide. We are not owed traumatic confessionals for the purposes of art or history. To look at someone who has lost a piece of their soul in a parade of horrors and say, “Now give us more,” is a bridge too far.

This all raises the question, “Who is this for?” For that query, I’m at a loss. You could argue it’s for the world and for posterity, but “the world” is a pretty broad category (blockbuster cinema is also “for the world,”) and there are more organized ways to create historical records for posterity (which is what organizations like the USC Shoah Foundation and Yad Vashem do). And for a Jewish audience, it can only add some more details to a picture we know all too well.

Obviously, the film isn’t for anti-Semites. If you think the Holocaust is a myth, then you’re not just one 9.5-hour documentary away from changing your identity and belief system, no matter how well that film is made. I also don’t think Lanzmann is trying to convince non-believers (hence the lack of archival material or historians other than Raul Hilberg).

You could say it’s for non-Jewish audiences, and perhaps in 1985 people were more willing to give a 9.5-hour Holocaust documentary a shot. But given the limited modes of distribution in the 80s and 90s, you’d have to either catch it in a theater (and that’s a long sit) or view it as a miniseries. Shoah didn’t even arrive on VHS until 2000, so the casual viewer was much more likely to see something like Schindler’s List than Shoah.

Beyond all those audiences, the remaining option is a liberal intelligentsia that’s likely already inclined to meet Lanzmann where he is, and while that may be enough to merit its acclaim (I don’t want to dismiss those who are genuinely moved and engaged with the film), it does lead us to our trickiest query.

Can You Criticize a Holocaust Movie?

Ebert calls Shoah “one of the noblest movies ever made.” I’ll agree that someone who spends over a decade of their life working on a Holocaust documentary isn’t indifferent to the suffering of his subjects. There’s nothing prosaic or workmanlike about Shoah. Lanzmann wants to put you in the headspace of the Holocaust from all perspectives. He wants the viewer to inhabit the space between the testimony and the contemporary location to make this atrocity come alive in your own mind, to see yourselves where the victims, bystanders, and perpetuators stood. That is certainly noble, but does that make Shoah one of the best movies of all-time? Does it make it a good documentary?

I would argue that for all the breadth of Lanzmann’s vision, it lacks specificity in its aims. It is a mosaic without a picture. Perhaps you could argue that its shapelessness is by design—the gestalt conveying feeling rather than a vision leading to a picture—but I feel like that lets Lanzmann off the hook for not having anything more than “The Holocaust is still with us.”

I respect the work that went into Shoah, and that’s why I’ve endeavored to try and understand Lanzmann’s choices even if I don't always agree with them. Some may feel that it eschews documentary (Lanzmann did, claiming it to be “a fiction of the real,” and clearly aiming for a more poetic than historical accounting of the Holocaust), but it is an attempt to document what happened. More often than not, that leaves Shoah an experience only for those already inclined to appreciate its artfulness rather than reach those like the gleeful Poles happily spewing anti-Semitic tropes outside a church while surrounding Holocaust survivor Simon Srebnik. In this way, for all of its craft, Shoah loses its potency. The film in practice becomes a closed circle of a travesty, where those who already know the atrocity nod their heads solemnly.

As a Jew, I find that dehumanizing in its own way. Through Lanzmann’s lens, these Jewish survivors are nothing more than the worst thing that has ever happened to them. Furthermore, there’s no real investigation into what it means to be Jewish through this lens. However, without any Jewish identity outside the Holocaust, all we’re left with is trauma. Part of what pushed me away from Judaism in my youth was the way adults in my life tried to center it around a Holocaust/Israel narrative, where there’s nothing moral or spiritual to be found. If your world is now death, then all that remains is cold, hard survival.

Looking at Shoah, I’m left torn between the intent and the execution. I’d agree with Ebert that the film has the noblest of intentions. It wants to sweep aside manufactured happy endings to force the audience to sit with an atrocity. It dares to ask if any sort of meaning can be derived from such meaningless bloodshed. It seeks to find the space between the scar and the wound that caused it. But there’s also only so many times you can hear about how people were led to a gas chamber before it ceases to illuminate and belabors a darkness all too visible.