Word: detail
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Neither a dramatization nor a documentary, Lanzmann's project achieves what neither of those genres could: it records actual memories, unmediated by any dramatist's conception, in the richest possible detail, recreating the fabric of ordinary life which was alternately shattered or untouched by the horrors of the Second World...
...chambers. At most one could attempt to convey the feeling of watching it, of listening to people speak about unspeakable horrors which they have themselves experienced. In nearly 10 hours, (the film is shown in two halves, on separate nights) there is not a slow moment, not a gratuitous detail...
...Lanzmann is obsessed with detail. "Excuse me," he will ask. "But what time in the morning was it? Six or seven a.m.? What color were the vans that took the Jews away?" Other critics who find fault with such meticulousness are missing the point of Lanzmann's goal: to render real experience in all its richness--not to interpret or to impose anything else. And these memories, which speak eloquently for themselves, in turn create new memories--from the painful to the exhilarating--for those who hear them...
Lanzmann makes no attempt to indoctrinate or to educate; he wantsonly to encourage each story in ultra-realistic detail, to bring out the unimaginable on the faces and in the words of his subjects. In particular the Czech Jew Filip Muller, who survived Auschwitz as a member of the "special detail" assigned to clearing out the gas chambers after each use, is remarkably lucid and eloquent. White-haired, handsome and soft-spoken, Muller tells how the victims scrambled once the gas was turned on, what he encountered when it was turned off. His are some of the longest and most...
Beyond his incessant attention to detail, Lanzmann's presentation of some of the more articulate survivors contains touches of conceptual, visual, and emotional brilliance. Neither glorifying nor exaggerating, he simply finds ways of lendering human experience both horrifying and beautiful...