Word: lanzmann
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
While Muller needs no prompting, others do. Sometimes, in fact, Lanzmann can't help but get involved, confrontational. It would be impossible not to. When his subjects recall less than Lanzmann knows they could, he prods them. He's done his homework. Armed with statistics and documents, he challenges Nazi officials with the facts (see box). He will not settle for less...
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...
...film's most powerful scenes, Lanzmann visits Israeli Jew and former Czech Abraham Bomba in Tel Aviv. With some coaxing from the director, Bomba recounts the story of his years at Treblinka. A professional barber, Bomba and several of his colleagues were chosen for the camp's special detail, spared the gas chamber but forced instead to prepare its victims, by shaving their heads. Day after day, he remembers, he and several others cut the hair of thousands of women, moments before their extermination, unaware of their fate...
What makes this scene more chilling more indescribably horrible than it could ever be in print or elsewhere, is that Lanzmann has Bomba tells his story in his own barbershop. Forty years later, he is still able to cut hair--and cut it with meticulous care, gentleness, and precision that draws a single haircut out minute after painstaking minute. It is incredible to hear, more incredible to watch this man. And this is only 10 minutes of the film...