Word: lanzmann
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...chances of winning that role later this month have been hit by an international campaign launched earlier this year. It began with a boom last May, when French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, and French film director Claude Lanzmann authored an editorial in Le Monde accusing Hosni of being a "dangerous man" who'd been responsible for a series of "insane declarations" regarding Israel and Jews. (See pictures of 60 years of Israel...
...Reviewing Claude Lanzmann's 9 1/2-hour documentary Shoah in TIME in 1985, I asked, "Why is this holocaust different from all other holocausts? In raw nightmare numbers, the Nazi extermination of 6 million European Jews ranks below the Soviet Union's systematic starvation of the rebellious Ukraine in 1932-33 (10 million by Stalin's count) and Mao's catastrophic Great Leap Forward into prolonged famine in 1957-62 (at least 27 million). Uganda and Kampuchea have produced more recent evidence" - alas, the examples of Rwanda, Bosnia and Somalia could subsequently be added - "that Hitler's policy of mass murder...
Like Historian Raul Hilberg, who bears eloquent witness in Shoah, Lanzmann did not begin his mammoth project by "asking the big questions." Instead he amassed thousands of details--the exact size of the gas chambers, the regimen of the SS killer-bureaucrats--and arranged them in a vast mosaic that exposes but does not explain the mystery of extermination. Many of the details are riveting. Former SS Officer Franz Suchomel (whom Lanzmann filmed with a camera concealed in his shoulder bag) sings the Treblinka marching song--"No Jew knows that today"--and describes a pit that consumed discarded bodies: "There...
Obsessed by his subject, Lanzmann wants to lick every Holocaust heart, and no matter if it bleeds on contact. Mordechaï Podchlebnik, the second Jewish survivor of Chelmno, "thanks God for what remains, and that he can forget." But Lanzmann will not let him forget; he even questions the man's fixed smile. Finally, Podchlebnik surrenders to the director's ghoulishness and quietly sobs. Abraham Bomba was once a barber at Treblinka, charged with cutting the hair of women and children in the gas chambers immediately before their execution. Today he cuts hair in Israel, and in a bizarre "photo...
...didn't do this for the pleasure of having him crack," Lanzmann told L'Express. His mission, as he saw it, was to lead each subject "toward the moment of truth." Whatever his journalistic ethics, Lanzmann proved himself an indefatigable guide on that journey. By the end of Shoah, the viewer is grateful to have made the forced march with him, for the film's achievement is to show there are stories worth hearing, and ravaged, resilient faces that reward our scrutiny. The horror, the gallows humor, the shame and the heroism, the lessons of this holocaust--and all others...