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Okay, I had people asking me what the hell was up with the last few posts, so, fueled up on beer and chocolate, I will try and explain.
Clause Lanzmann died today. As you may have noticed, I have EMOTIONS about this.
Claude Lanzmann did a lot of shit in his time, but his most famous achievement- and something anyone could happily have died after making and consider their life complete- was the debatably best film ever made, the documentary Shoah.
As part of my Holocaust MA some five years back, I watched the whole eight hours of it and- holy. fucking. shit.
What I watched was nothing less than a guy using the survivors and bystanders and perpetrators of the Holocaust to create his own personal time machine back into this particular abyss, and dragging us in with him.
And the means by which he created this masterpiece can only be described as morally bankrupt.
This guy brought one of the only survivors of the death camp Chelmno (really a fancy name for a clearing in the woods with some gas vans in it) back to the local town and deliberately surrounded him with a whole fucking crowd of local church goes and asked them leading questions until the whole town was screaming about how the Jews had it coming and deserved it and it was god’s will- all the while this poor fuck was standing in the middle staring at the camera with an expression I can’t even begin to describe.
This guy got a survivor of the Auschwitz sonderkommando who used to cut the hair of people going to the gas chambers to give an interview but stipulated the interview had to be while he cut hair in a barber’s shop after finding out the poor bastard hadn’t done hairdressing since the camps. He didn’t stop asking questions, even after the guy begged for him to stop.
Then, on the flip side of the morally bankrupt coin, he lied his head off to former nazis prison guards that of course he wasn’t going to tell their stories to anyone, he wasn’t going to take notes, he was just curious about the history, they could trust him, it was safe.
He didn’t take notes. He only bugged himself with microphones and cameras and left a van with the recording equipment running outside their nice suburban German houses and recorded every last word of their shameless, grotesque stories.
Gods, I hope those arsefucks got what was coming to them.
And after all that, after he had made the most priceless and pitiless documentary imaginable- then he had the fucking nerve to make it clear he had no idea what he’d made. The interviews he gave about Shoah made that blatantly clear. He seemed to think it was something like the recordings Spielberg made of Holocaust survivors telling their stories- he’d all but physically dragged us and everyone around him back in time to witness everything!
He actually had the nerve to boast that if he found footage taken inside a gas chamber, he would destroy it- when in Shoah he spent an entire long tracking shot over a intricately detailed model of a gas chamber just after the poor barbershop guy finally broke down and wished he’d died along with his friends and family in those same gas chambers.
Like- dude. You are the bastards to end all bastards. Just fucking claim it. If you’d had a time machine, you’d have gone back and shot the whole thing in the closest and most meticulous detail. Since you didn’t, you retraumatised a bunch of people as the next best thing.
I know this doesn’t make Shoah come off that well- but seriously, I made the Chauvet Cave comparison for a reason. This is a priceless work of art, written in trauma and ash, everyone should watch it, it’s on most top ten films of all time for a reason. It even justifies the means of its own creation and how many of us can say that?
It just pisses me the fuck off that Claude Lanzmann died before he could actually grasp what the fuck he’d made.
Okay, I had people asking me what the hell was up with the last few posts, so, fueled up on beer and chocolate, I will try and explain.
Clause Lanzmann died today. As you may have noticed, I have EMOTIONS about this.
Claude Lanzmann did a lot of shit in his time, but his most famous achievement- and something anyone could happily have died after making and consider their life complete- was the debatably best film ever made, the documentary Shoah.
As part of my Holocaust MA some five years back, I watched the whole eight hours of it and- holy. fucking. shit.
What I watched was nothing less than a guy using the survivors and bystanders and perpetrators of the Holocaust to create his own personal time machine back into this particular abyss, and dragging us in with him.
And the means by which he created this masterpiece can only be described as morally bankrupt.
This guy brought one of the only survivors of the death camp Chelmno (really a fancy name for a clearing in the woods with some gas vans in it) back to the local town and deliberately surrounded him with a whole fucking crowd of local church goes and asked them leading questions until the whole town was screaming about how the Jews had it coming and deserved it and it was god’s will- all the while this poor fuck was standing in the middle staring at the camera with an expression I can’t even begin to describe.
This guy got a survivor of the Auschwitz sonderkommando who used to cut the hair of people going to the gas chambers to give an interview but stipulated the interview had to be while he cut hair in a barber’s shop after finding out the poor bastard hadn’t done hairdressing since the camps. He didn’t stop asking questions, even after the guy begged for him to stop.
Then, on the flip side of the morally bankrupt coin, he lied his head off to former nazis prison guards that of course he wasn’t going to tell their stories to anyone, he wasn’t going to take notes, he was just curious about the history, they could trust him, it was safe.
He didn’t take notes. He only bugged himself with microphones and cameras and left a van with the recording equipment running outside their nice suburban German houses and recorded every last word of their shameless, grotesque stories.
Gods, I hope those arsefucks got what was coming to them.
And after all that, after he had made the most priceless and pitiless documentary imaginable- then he had the fucking nerve to make it clear he had no idea what he’d made. The interviews he gave about Shoah made that blatantly clear. He seemed to think it was something like the recordings Spielberg made of Holocaust survivors telling their stories- he’d all but physically dragged us and everyone around him back in time to witness everything!
He actually had the nerve to boast that if he found footage taken inside a gas chamber, he would destroy it- when in Shoah he spent an entire long tracking shot over a intricately detailed model of a gas chamber just after the poor barbershop guy finally broke down and wished he’d died along with his friends and family in those same gas chambers.
Like- dude. You are the bastards to end all bastards. Just fucking claim it. If you’d had a time machine, you’d have gone back and shot the whole thing in the closest and most meticulous detail. Since you didn’t, you retraumatised a bunch of people as the next best thing.
I know this doesn’t make Shoah come off that well- but seriously, I made the Chauvet Cave comparison for a reason. This is a priceless work of art, written in trauma and ash, everyone should watch it, it’s on most top ten films of all time for a reason. It even justifies the means of its own creation and how many of us can say that?
It just pisses me the fuck off that Claude Lanzmann died before he could actually grasp what the fuck he’d made.