Word: lanzmann
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...camp sites today, is likely to raise apprehensions and even yawns. We have seen all that too many times before; next atrocity, please. And in fact the testimony in Shoah (a Hebrew word for cataclysm) does not justify either the film's extraordinary length or French Director Claude Lanzmann's relentless badgering of some of the victims. Still and all, it is salutary to be confronted, hour after hour after hour, with memories horrifying enough to fill a dozen movies. Subjecting oneself to Shoah is like being strapped down for an extended session with the exorcist...
...critic Will Tremper headlined his review "Indiana Jones in the Krakow Ghetto." He excoriated Spielberg's vision as "pure Hollywood . . . the fantasies of a young boy from California who had never taken an interest in the Holocaust or the Jews before." Both critics were reflecting the view of Claude Lanzmann, director of the 1985 death-camp documentary Shoah. "It is seen from a very slanted angle, almost like an adventure story," Lanzmann wrote in London's Evening Standard. "Even if Spielberg believes that he has respected the historical truth, and I am sure he does, the general impression is distorting...
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...