The director Claude Lanzmann, who continued to make films and to publish into his 90s, was one of the great generation of postwar public intellectuals on the progressive left: a mandarin of European thought, a panjandrum of contemporary ethics. Lanzmann was a contemporary of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre with a dashing and even rather swashbuckling profile, a magazine founder, a petition signer, a superstar attender at soirées and conferences. It all made him appear as a man of action as well as a man of contemplation: and someone whose amours arguably marked him out as steeped in the robustly male sexual politics of an era different from the present day.
Born to a Jewish family in Paris, he was a veteran both of the French resistance (in which he fought as a teenager) and of opposition to the Algerian wars, and his French citizenship and impeccable record of courage and heroism in the second world war gave him the objectivity and credentials to work on his remarkable masterpiece, Shoah (1985). This was in an age when there were many Holocaust survivors still alive, with fiercely strong memories, and indeed when many culpable Nazis were still secretly at large.
Shoah was a nine-and-a-half hour oral history record of the Holocaust, edited down from 350 hours of raw interview footage; it had some contemporary newsreel material but was effectively based entirely on verbal recollections of people involved: breaking down into four parts, discussions of three camps: Chelmno, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw Ghetto. Lanzmann interviewed the victims, survivors and witnesses, but also some perpetrators, including an SS officer, who had only agreed to speak off camera so they couldn’t be recognised. Lanzmann used a hidden camera for these interviews, an imposture which was widely hailed as entirely justified, though Lanzmann was physically attacked at one stage when the concealed camera was discovered.
Lanzmann established a procedure for talking and thinking about the Holocaust which in its honesty, integrity, rigour and good faith has never been seriously challenged or repudiated. Attempts to show the horror on camera, either in documentary form or – more difficult still – as drama, are always liable to be criticised as sentimentalising, or sensationalising, or fetishising. But the austerity of just someone speaking is very different. The emphasis is simply on what happened, though always with a sense that the whole story can never be covered. The larger sense of why – why and how German nation came to embrace such evil – is not part of the film’s remit, and in fact Lanzmann did not care to venture into this arena of thought, in case it becomes a kind of counsel for the defence. For Lanzmann, the question defined the Wittgensteinian ne plus ultra: it was that whereof we could not speak.
Later, in his film The Last of the Unjust, he tackled the question of complicity, by bringing to light his unused 1970s interview footage with Austrian Jewish survivor Benjamin Murmelstein, the “chairman” of the Theresienstadt Ghetto near Prague, reviled for having negotiated with Adolf Eichmann on the subject of enforced Jewish emigration. He is treated with great generosity by Lanzmann, who emphasises the cruelty and humiliation which these “elders” endured.
When I met Lanzmann at the Cannes film festival last year, it was like meeting a Buddha of the cinema: he sat and listened to my questions seated in a kind of squatting position on a sofa, his chin resting on the handle of a cane, looking away from me and gazing out to sea. It was on the occasion of his one of his last films, Napalm, about a personal story which he first told in his memoir The Patagonian Hare. As a young man, he was part of a delegation to North Korea and had a passionate romantic escapade with a beautiful North Korean nurse. I suggested to him that there may have been elements of a honeytrap in this, and he reacted with extravagant and very funny scorn, emphasising the genuine passion with which he and the young woman kissed – he actually mimed hugging and kissing – and imperiously told me: “It is probably because you read too much John le Carré that you think this. But I like your idea. It is a very British idea.”
Lanzmann was a remarkable man. An open, free, all-day showing of Shoah every 27th January at the BFI Southbank for Holocaust Memorial Day would be a great way for him to be remembered.
