Feature: Seeing Nothing: Lanzmann, Godard and Sontag’s Fantasies of Voluntarism
About the extermination strictly speaking there is nothing.
—Claude Lanzmann
o how marvelous
to be able to watch what one can’t see
—Jean-Luc Godard
Less than ten years separate the births of Claude Lanzmann (b. 1925), Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) and Susan Sontag (b. 1933), three of the twentieth century’s most significant theorists of the image. Each was a child or adolescent during the war who avoided, by accident of circumstance and birth, its worst depredations; each would be profoundly affected by images—real and imagined—of the Holocaust. Each describes that experience by using the term “nothing”—not, however, as we might expect, to designate absence but rather to indicate presence. For these thinkers, in other words, something comes from nothing; that something, I argue, is a notion of individual agency that we might have supposed destroyed forever by the very events that prompted the images to which these thinkers respond.
I begin by considering a debate between Godard and Lanzmann over the value of something that is straightforwardly nothing, in that it does not exist: hypothetical footage of the so-called “Final Solution” in operation. The imagined film would show what happened in the gas chambers in the Nazi extermination camps. In a version of the hyperbolic rhetoric that characterises the debate, one critic has named this hypothetical footage la pellicule maudite (the damned film/footage) [Delfour qtd. in Saxton 53].[1] Godard is convinced that this footage exists:
I have no proof of what I’m saying, but I think that if I got to work on it with a good investigative journalist, within twenty years I would find images of the gas chambers. We would see the deportees arriving and we would see in what state they left. (qtd. in Brody 585)
Godard’s stake in this search is higher than the quixotic, even bemusing image of Godard as muckraking journalist or private investigator suggests. The discovery of such footage—and, one presumes, its manipulation in the technique of montage that characterizes Godard’s work—would redress nothing less than what he calls the failure of cinema. Explaining to an interviewer that the New Wave was anything but a revolutionary beginning, Godard describes his idiosyncratic history of cinema:
[I]n fact [by the time of the New Wave] it was already too late. It was all over. The culmination was the moment when we didn’t film the concentration camps. At that instant, cinema completely neglected its duty. Six million people, mainly Jews, were killed or gassed, and cinema was not there… In not filming the concentration camps, cinema completely gave up. (qtd. in Saxton 48)
Godard replaces the pronoun “we” with the noun “cinema,” as if he wishes to elide the question of agency and responsibility. Who constitutes this “we” anyway? The Nazis? The Allies who liberated the camps?[2] Humanity as a whole? I submit that it is in Godard’s interest to avoid such questions, so that he can reserve personal pronouns, like the heroic “I” of the previous passage, hunting down footage we didn’t even know we had lost, for the task of rehabilitating a surprisingly naïve understanding of human agency and intentionality. Godard’s personification of cinema as a failed agent thus displaces responsibility away from anyone in particular or everyone in general, and preserves the notion of human agency as not only possible but also efficacious.
Richard Brody’s excellent biography of Godard shows that the filmmaker had long been preoccupied by, even obsessed with, the relation of cinema to the events of the Holocaust. But the event that prompted Godard’s thoughts about the hypothetical gas chamber footage was the release and critical success of Claude Lanzmann’s nine and a half hour documentary Shoah (1985). Godard particularly took exception to Lanzmann’s decision to avoid historical footage of any kind and to use historical documentation sparingly. (One of very few exceptions of the latter is a memorandum, read by Lanzmann, which describes the limitations of the gas vans that were used as a precursor to the gas chambers (the exhaust was sent into the back of the truck, asphyxiating its human cargo). Significantly, Lanzmann immediately connects this document to the present: the trucks were manufactured by a company named Saurer, a company that, as we learn when the camera closes in on the mud flaps of a truck in modern-day Germany, remains in business.) Kent Jones is right to suggest, in a recent reappraisal of the film, that there is something amazing in the perpetual amazement expressed by the film’s viewers about Lanzmann’s decision (62). For Godard, at least, that amazement is expressed as hostility, beginning with his claim that the film “showed nothing at all” (qtd in Saxton 46).[3]
Godard’s use of “nothing” is echoed but countered by Lanzmann’s assertion that, after a year spent reading historical and theoretical sources about the Holocaust—sources of the same order as Godard’s imagined historical footage—in preparation for shooting his film, he “understood nothing,” an absence that he could only counter by setting Shoah entirely in the present (Chevrie 38). What Godard might consider the most important something—archival material, photographic and cinematic images of the events of the “final solution”—is nothing to Lanzmann: “I call these ‘images without imagination.’ They are just images that have no power” (40). But Lanzmann, who is like Godard and indeed everyone who inveighs on this topic in that he seems compelled to make extravagant statements, does not simply disagree with Godard’s desire for archival material, the ne plus ultra of which would be the hypothetical gas chamber footage. Rather, he accepts the terms of Godard’s fantasy—only, of course, to repudiate it entirely:
If I had found an existing film—a secret film because it was strictly prohibited—made by an SS man showing how 3,000 Jews, men, women and children, died together, asphyxiated in the gas chamber of Crematorium II at Auschwitz; if I had found that, not only would I not have shown it, I would have destroyed it. I am not capable of saying why. It goes without saying. (qtd. in Saxton 128 n6)
Godard took this response as a prohibition. He linked it to the famously misunderstood statement of Theodor Adorno’s that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz:
There’s no point to issuing prohibitions like Lanzmann or Adorno, who exaggerate, because then we find ourselves caught up in endless discussions over formulas such as, “It’s unfilmable”—one must not prevent people from filming, one must not burn books, or else one can no longer criticize them. (qtd. in Brody 585)
Others have levelled similar accusations at Lanzmann, including Ron Rosenbaum, whose intemperate response to the latter’s theories of whether the Holocaust can be understood stem, in large measure, from an event that took place at Yale University in the 1990s. The survivor and analyst Louis Micheels invited Lanzmann to respond to a documentary about the Nazi doctor Eduard Wirths, who had helped Micheels and others to survive the notorious extermination camp “selections”. Once Lanzmann saw the film, in the days before the event, he refused to be present at the screening or to discuss it; he would only discuss his refusal. In the text of that evening’s proceedings some attendees criticise Lanzmann for his highhanded refusal to engage with the film or, indeed, even to show it. One person calls that refusal “an ideological stance which is a repetition of exactly what it is that you’re attempting to help us understand” (214). This is not the only time Lanzmann’s attitude has been compared to the Nazis’. Lanzmann has repeatedly explained his refusal to understand the Holocaust (he has called such understanding “an obscenity”) by referring to a story told by Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz (1958). Like all the deportees, Levi found himself plagued by thirst on his arrival at Auschwitz. He reaches for an icicle hanging from one of the barracks; an SS guard immediately snatches it away. To Levi’s (astonished and, in the circumstances, astonishing) question: Why? the guard replies: Hier ist kein warum (Here there is no why). Rosenbaum and Micheels observe that it is peculiar for Lanzmann to predicate his response to the Holocaust on the claims of the perpetrators (Rosenbaum 265-6, Micheels qtd. in Lanzmann Obscenity 219 n. 8). Some critics, like the historian Dominick LaCapra, have considered Lanzmann’s responses in philosophical terms, describing his method as a Bilderverbot, an instance of a ban on images, as presented in the Second Commandment.
Yet any attempt to oppose Godard and Lanzmann, despite the apparent opposition of the stands they take on the matter of the gas chamber footage, will ultimately founder. It is not merely that, as Saxton argues, the two are united by their opposition to conventional modes of filmmaking, exemplified by their shared whipping boy, Steven Spielberg. There are genuine differences between them. But those differences are not the ones they first seem to be. Looking more closely, we see a chiastic rather than an oppositional relation between Lanzmann and Godard.
Lanzmann refuses the idea of the archive in favour of testimony. He uses no historical footage, refers almost to no primary documents, stages no historical reconstructions (except in the idiosyncratic form of memory, as I note below). Instead he presents us with testimony—we listen as three groups of people, Nazi perpetrators, Polish gentile bystanders, and Jewish survivors, tell us, in response to Lanzmann’s often insistent questions, their stories. Following the principle laid down in Holocaust historiography by Raul Hilberg (who is interviewed in the film), Lanzmann values minutiae. He does not ask: why did the Holocaust happen? He asks instead: what colour were the Saurer vans? Shoah, he says, is a film “from the ground up, a topographical film, a geographical film” (Chevrie 39). Especially given that many of these interviews are conducted through a translator—and the process of translation is not edited out; we see it in action—Lanzmann’s film is organised around mediation. He values the indirect over the direct. But this valuation, although never stated as such, is only strategic, temporary. It is ultimately subordinated to an even stronger belief in its opposite—the idea of direct access to the past, specifically to the events of the Holocaust. In making a film in which every shot takes place in the present, Lanzmann affirms the continuity of the Holocaust in contemporary life. (Not least in scenes in which Polish peasants, obstreperously posed in front of a church, assert to Lanzmann that there were never problems with the Jews, yet their language, so redolent of anti-Semitism, replicates the logic of the Holocaust.) Primarily the past continues to live on in the present through memory, which, for Lanzmann, is most valuable when it returns the witness to past experiences, flooding him (Lanzmann’s interviewees are almost invariably male) in an abreaction that dissolves the distinction between past and present. Thus Lanzmann’s preference for moments in which what he calls a “neutral and flat” discourse about the past gives way to something much more overwhelming, and the witness, like a psychoanalytic patient, finds himself reliving past experience. Such moments sometimes happen serendipitously, such as when the engineer who drove trainloads of Jews to Treblinka, asked by Lanzmann to once again drive a similar locomotive, spontaneously reproduces the throat-slitting gesture (hand slashed across the windpipe) he made at the time, apparently to warn the Jews of their impending fate. (“Compared to this image,” says Lanzmann, “archival photographs become unbearable.” (Chevrie 43).) But sometimes they must be staged, as in the much-discussed example of the testimony of Abraham Bomba. Bomba, a barber in life before and after his internment, was ordered to cut the hair of women prisoners before their gassing. Lanzmann questions him in a barbershop in Tel Aviv that he had rented for the day; he asked the newly retired Bomba to cut a volunteer’s hair. As Lanzmann puts it:
And from this moment on, truth became incarnate, and as he relived the scene, his knowledge became carnal. It is a film about the incarnation of truth. That’s a cinematic scene. (Chevrie 41)
Lanzmann’s dizzying rhetoric is at once of immediacy and mediation: the incarnation of the past, through repeated relived corporeal gestures, is a cinematic scene. Mere telling is not enough; witnesses had to act out their story; they had to become their past (and thus still-present) self. LaCapra uses Freudian terminology to describe Lanzmann’s method: the latter seeks out moments in which witnesses “act out” their experience, but it is unclear whether he allows them to “work through” those abreactions. Either way, the paradox I am emphasising is that Lanzmann repudiates the past only to affirm it. He denigrates one notion of history only to arrive at another (in his eyes, more valuable, all-encompassing). As Lanzmann puts it, “the film is the abolition of all distance between past and present; I relive this history in the present” (Chevrie 45). Through indirect access we arrive at direct access; or, to change the metaphor, we blind ourselves in order to see. This metaphor comes from Lanzmann himself, who repeatedly describes his filmmaking in terms of blindness:
Not to understand was my ironclad rule during all the years Shoah was in the making… Keeping my guard up, wearing these blinkers, and this blindness itself, were the vital condition of creation. Blindness should be understood here as seeing in its purest form, the only way not to avert the gaze to a reality that is literally blinding: blindness as clear-sightedness itself. (Hier 51)
Godard, by contrast, values the archive rather than testimony. Thus he wants direct footage of the camps, not indirect witnessing from years later. Perhaps surprisingly, given his constant awareness of film as an opaque medium of representation, Godard cannot conceive of any filming that isn’t direct. Even the possibility of a fictional film about the Holocaust, although not for him the abhorrent impossibility it is for Lanzmann, runs aground on a breathtaking refusal of the very idea of fictionality. In an interview given in 1980 at Cannes, Godard explained:
I’d like to make a film on the concentration camps. But one must have the means. How to find twenty thousand extras who weigh thirty kilos? What’s more, one would have to really beat them. But what assistant would be willing to beat up a skeletal extra? (qtd. in Brody 510)
This is polemical, surely. But if one thinks, for example, of the physical beauty, despite makeup and other effects, and health of the actors in a fictional cinematic reconstruction like Schindler’s List (1993) one gets a sense of what Godard is critiquing. (We might take Godard’s statement as an oblique contribution to the debate begun by Jacques Rivette about the tracking shot of Emmanuel Riva’s death in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapo (1959), which Conall Cash has written about elsewhere in this issue.) Thus I think we should take Godard at his word here, which would be to concede that film cannot countenance fictiveness, which would be to believe that it offers direct access to the real. But it does so not simply through a naïve, positivistic notion of reference or evidentiariness. (Though, to be sure, at the bottom of Godard’s claim must lie something like Barthes’s claim about photography in Camera Lucida—that in this art there is an actual trace of the historical referent.) Godard is famous for saying that there is no such thing as a just image; there is just an image. But in fact his philosophy makes the contrary claim—that images are by definition connected to justice. Recall his pronouncement: the failure of cinema is that it did not film the camps. As Brody explains, this absence or oversight can only be a failure if film has extraordinary powers. Godard assumes “the medium’s overwhelming popularity would have compelled a worldwide public outcry against the Holocaust, had it only been shown in movies. He took for granted the power of images… to inspire viewers’ confidence, compel their belief, and arouse their outrage” (Brody 512). In the first episode of Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-98), Godard speaks similarly of the cinema’s “humble/and formidable power/of transfiguration” (39). For Godard, this failure is a function of cinema’s preference for its spectacular rather than its documentary tradition.
But just like Lanzmann, who valued indirect testimony as a means of achieving direct access to the past, Godard complicates his argument by reversing the value of his terms. The direct access to the past that cinema (at least in its Godardian incarnation) promises is predicated on indirection—on the manipulation of images, on the transformation of their meaning by their juxtaposition through montage. Indeed, for all his dislike of Shoah, Godard has availed himself of the film, taking the footage of the train driver at Treblinka and manipulating it in slow motion in one of the episodes of Histoire(s) du Cinema; the latter is the text he created in some ways as a response to Shoah, composed as it is by nothing but “archival” footage (be it historical, found, or excerpted from other films). For Godard, then, the value of the immediate is only apparent through its translation via mediation.
Saxton is right when she says that these disagreements, however strongly worded, don’t appear overwhelming in the face of most cinematic representations of the Holocaust. Godard and Lanzmann have both, for example, spoken out against Schindler’s List. (Born in 1946, Spielberg is of a different generation than Godard, Lanzmann, and Sontag.) Its most discussed scene is the one in which a trainload of the Schindlerjuden, having mistakenly been sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau rather than to a work camp in Czechoslovakia, are shaved, stripped, and herded into a bath and disinfection room that is ominously bolted behind them. We watch, first from outside the room, through a porthole in the door, and then from inside, as the terrified women wait for what they assume will be their death by gas. When the showerheads release water, the scene becomes a redemptive one in which their cries of terror are washed away in cries of joy. The scene is followed by one in which the women, dressed again, are marched past a separate line of people who are being led down into a building that a crane shot, gliding up to show the smoke and ash coming from the building’s chimney, metonymically tells us is the real gas chamber in which the overwhelming majority of prisoners perished.
This is a dubious scene, to be sure, like much of the film one of exquisite kitsch, which plays shamelessly on our feelings. (Although there is something interestingly sadistic about aligning us, however momentarily, with the Nazi gaze, as we look through the porthole. It is unclear how self-conscious the film is at that moment, so it is difficult to know what we are to make of the intimated connection between viewer and perpetrator.) But is it so different from the content of Godard’s desired and Lanzmann’s dreaded film? Recall Godard’s initial description of the hypothetical film: “We would see the deportees arriving and we would see in what state they left.” Spielberg’s tracking shot elides the material horror of the process (the deliberately stage-y mise-en-scene—the scene was shot on a stage set constructed immediately outside the gates of Birkenau, where Speilberg was refused permission to film—as well as the trembling violin of the nondiegetic score lessen the horror of the scene), but, in the end, his scene offers a similar dialectic of seen and unseen to Godard’s imaginings. For even Godard, in his description of the ultimate footage (of the Holocaust, of the twentieth century, even of cinema itself), elides its central “action”—the moment of dying that comes between arrival and departure. Even the (fantasized, imagined, hypothetical) presence of this ultimate footage, then, is haunted by absence.
We may well have to agree with Lanzmann when he says, “About the extermination strictly speaking there is nothing” (Chevrie 40, emphasis in original). But “nothing” fails to appear as such. It is always a spur to something. For Lanzmann and Godard, what matters is the framing of that nothingness. (The same is true for Spielberg, even if the others resent his decision as exploitative. It seems, in the end, to be a question of what kind of exploitation one cares for: the manipulation of Godard’s montage; the staging of Lanzmann’s abreactions; or the false consolations of Spielberg’s emphases, which make the story of the Holocaust a story of survival and regeneration.)
The debate between Godard and Lanzmann is ultimately most interesting not as a contest between competing imperatives as to how the Holocaust should be represented, but as an expression of a powerful fantasy. Instead of asking: What should we do with hypothetical footage of the gas chamber?, I would rather us ask: What is at stake in even imagining that such footage exists? What dreams and desires are enabled by this fantasized object? La pellicule maudite is a sublime object—it is imagined to have an overwhelming force that threatens to shatter the viewer (it cannot be comprehended; it makes a mockery of our pretensions to rationality; it destroys understanding) but that, crucially, ultimately does not do so, such that the viewer can overcome its assault through a renewed assertion of individual willpower. The fantasised footage makes viewers into survivors. Implicit in that survival is a judgement on those who perished. Let me refine this statement by adding to our discussion of Godard and Lanzmann a claim made by Susan Sontag, a critic (as well as a filmmaker) who praised both of these figures and for whom the Holocaust was also a defining event, all the more so for happening at such remove from her personal circumstances.
Sontag seldom inserted personal anecdote into her essays. (You can read Illness as Metaphor, for example, and never know that she had cancer.) But she did at least once, in her essay “In Plato’s Cave.” The subject that prompts this autobiographical turn is the visual representation of the Holocaust:
One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about. (19-20, my emphasis)
The passage is structured around a deviation. It begins in Sontag’s typical mode: abstract, generalising, even universalising, as suggested by that knowing pronoun “one.” Note that this generalised tendency extends, initially, to the very subject of her investigation: the photographic representation of “ultimate horror,” which, despite the superlative adjective, doesn’t have a particular or necessary referent. Only in the next sentence, in which Sontag describes her own iteration of this “prototypically modern” experience, does she refer to the Holocaust. The heightened rhetorical mode of the passage only increases in the following sentences. Sontag uses the language of trauma to describe the photographs’ effect: she is taken by surprise, unable (initially) to process what she sees; in short, wounded. Indeed, the metaphorical wounding of being cut comes to seem literal in the face of the second metaphor of division—as if she were literally cut by the photographs that then metaphorically cut her life in two. Yet the extremity of the situation experienced by Sontag (there is life before these photographs and life after) incites, in the move from innocence to experience, something like a “fortunate fall.” Note that, although nothing Sontag has seen (or, presumably, will see) has the power of these photographs, the nothingness they threaten her with is eventually overcome by understanding: “it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.” This assertion of capable individual agency is heightened by Sontag’s repeated use of the first person in the passage, even in moments that do not necessarily call for it, such as the “to me” in the beginning part of the final sentence.
Sontag’s assertion of her ability to traverse the horror of the nothing—a version of the “radical will” she had written about in an earlier book—is echoed in a statement made by Lanzmann about his strategy in making Shoah:
I knew that the subject of my film would be death itself, death and not survival, a radical contradiction because it attested, in a way, to the impossibility of the enterprise I was throwing myself into, since the dead couldn’t speak for the dead. But it was also an illumination of such power that, once this decision became clear to me, I knew immediately that I’d see it through to the end, that nothing could make me abandon it. My film would take up the ultimate challenge: to replace the nonexistent images of death in the gas chambers. (qtd. in Tzvee, my emphasis)
This declaration takes the same form of reversal that I have delineated above: one form of knowing (“I knew immediately that I’d see it through to the end”; I take this to be a version of the carnal knowledge Lanzmann sought to instantiate in his interviewees) trumps another (that of theory, of the “obscenity” of conventional understanding). Even more explicitly than for Sontag, nothingness in the form of nonexistent images can be traversed, by a reversal of the use of the term “nothing.” Now nothing can stop Lanzmann—this use of “nothing” is a kind of grammatical dummy or placeholder, which is triumphantly replaced by the first person; by the individual actions and abilities of Claude Lanzmann.
Godard too partakes of similar rhetoric; he asserts his agency in his claim that the gas chamber footage can be found: “I think that if I got to work on it with a good investigative journalist, within twenty years I would find images of the gas chambers.” He admits he has no proof, he too works against some kind of nothingness, but he remains undaunted. Even if he needs the help of another, it is still “I,” Jean-Luc Godard, who will find the images.
These indicators of agency, the insistent assertions of the first person, serve the desire to counter the lack of agency experienced by the victims of the Holocaust. Similarly, much post-Holocaust education for Jewish children in America has taken the form of assertion of individual will. What would you have done?, Jewish children are asked in religious school classes as they simulate scenarios in which they imagine what prized possessions (including home, family, food, etc) they would give up in their attempt to escape.[4] The intention of such exercises might be to honour the lost, but the effect is to assert the present-day individual, who can imagine herself able to avoid the fate of those others. The desire to put oneself in the shoes of the other—as, for example, visitors to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C. are asked to do, when upon arriving they receive a card with the name and personal information of one of the Holocaust’s victim, whose “progress” they check in on at various moments in their pilgrimage through the museum—is less an exercise in identification than, necessarily, in superiority.
The real import of the gas chamber footage debate, or indeed of any discussion of images or other representations of the Holocaust, is the support it gives to a fantasy of extreme voluntarism, that is, a belief in the power of individual agency.[5] In his late work The Drowned and the Saved (1987), Primo Levi lamented what he called the intolerable exceptionalism of the survivor, who in an essential way does not know the truth of the camps (a truth “known” only to those who did not survive, who he names “the drowned”) and owes his survival to forces beyond his control. As he puts it: “we survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it” (83).
In the end, then, perhaps Spielberg is the most honest of our image-makers, in that his film explicitly plays to the fantasy of individual agency, as noted in the very terms Schindlerjuden and Schindler’s List—the Jews who belong to Schindler, the list that Schindler makes. It is Schindler who makes a difference, who heroically contests what Alain Resnais in Night and Fog called the Nazi machine. When I say most honest I mean least dishonest. Spielberg offers a false view of the Holocaust, but he does not claim to be avoiding that falsity. He never claims to value the nothing that Godard, Lanzmann, and even Sontag transmute into the something of the self. With Spielberg, what you see is what you get. With the others, what you don’t see, unless you look closely, is the triumph of an I that claims not to see.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” Prisms. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1997. 17-34.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1982.
Brody, Richard. Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Metropolitan-Holt, 2008.
Chevrie, Marc and Herve le Roux. “Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about Shoah.” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Ed. Stuart Liebman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 37-50.
Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon Amour. Trans. Richard Seaver. New York: Grove, 1994.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Complete Text. Trans. John Howe. Histoire(s) du Cinema. 4 vols. ECM, 1989. CD.
Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.
Jones, Kent. “Present Tense.” Film Comment Jan./Feb. 2011: 62-7.
Lacapra, Dominick. “Lanzmann’s Shoah: “Here there is No Why.” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Ed. Stuart Liebman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 191-229.
Lanzmann, Claude. “Hier ist kein Warum.” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Ed. Stuart Liebman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 51-2.
—. “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 200-20.
Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. 1988. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Night and Fog [Nuit et Brouillard]. Dir. Alain Resnais. 1955. Criterion, 2003. DVD.
Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil. New York: Random, 1998.
Saxton, Libby. Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London: Wallflower, 2008.
Schindler’s List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perfs. Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes. 1993. Universal, 2004. DVD.
Shoah. Dir. Claude Lanzmann. 1985. New Yorker, 2003. DVD
Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography. 1977. New York: Picador-Farrar, n.d. 1-24.
Tzvee. “Is Claude Lanzmann Jewish?” Tzvee’s Talmudic Blog. 10 Dec. 2010. Web. 20 July 2011.
[1] This lugubrious term has been applied both to the imagined film and to actual photographs, a handful of which survive, taken by members of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944. It is fitting, then, that Godard’s pronouncements on the subject typically use the more neutral term “image” rather than “film” or “photograph.” In what follows, I treat photography and film interchangeably, not because I think they are the same or that the differences between them are negligible, but because the critical conversation spurred by Godard and Lanzmann’s debate has been careless about the distinction. In general, though, the unseen text that I am considering here is hypothetical film footage that would presumably have been made by the Nazis.
The Sonderkommando were teams of prisoners, mostly Jewish, forced to operate the machinery of the gas chambers and crematoria. Some of these men committed suicide; most were murdered by the Nazis; a small number survived. Lanzmann is fascinated by these survivors, presumably because he considers them, as the operators of the gas chambers, to be closest to the centre of the Holocaust. Accordingly, their testimony is privileged in Shoah beyond that of other survivors, such as those who survived the camps in other ways or who spent the war years in hiding.
[2] American soldiers did, in fact, film and photograph what they found when they liberated Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. These shocking images—I will have more to say below about Susan Sontag’s response to them—have been used in documentaries about the Holocaust without clear acknowledgement of what they show. That is, they are often used as a stand in for the depredations of the camps. Like many others, Godard uses the term “concentration camp” loosely. Concentration camps were forced labor camps in which, for example, prisoners quarried stone or performed other sorts of physically demanding labor. Although terrifying and destructive of human dignity and life, they were not extermination camps of the sort developed, beginning in 1941, for mass murder, in particular the mass murder of the Jews.
[3] Godard made a similar comment in a televised debate with Marguerite Duras about Shoah: “”Lanzmann didn’t show anything—he showed the Germans” (qtd in Brody 511). Duras was furious, perhaps because Godard seems to criticize the sentiment expressed in the opening of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), for which Duras wrote the screenplay (its first line reads: “You saw nothing at Hiroshima. Nothing.” (15)).
[4] I owe this knowledge to personal conversations with Marianne Tettlebaum, June 2011.
[5] I take the term “voluntarism” from Molly Hite’s discussion the theory of intentionality that governs both our assumptions about narrative, be they fictional or actual (25).
