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Reflections on the Film Shoah
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11477 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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10 / 1986 |
1,792 Words |
| Author
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Douglas C. Moore
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During the past year, a very quiet, very impressive film offering has been coming slowly and frighteningly from behind, running in a few selected theaters the world over. Its title, simply and succinctly, is Shoah, and atypically is a motion picture presentation that lasts almost ten hours.
"Shoah" is a Hebrew word that means "destruction," "laid waste," "annihilation," and this filmed presentation is about one particular phase of the systematic murder of Jews by the nazis and their cohorts during the early 1940s. The focus is on only two death camps: Treblinka and Auschwitz, and the locale is Poland, not Germany.
The presentation given at most theaters is in two parts, each part having its own midpoint intermission. The first part runs four and a half hours and the second part runs almost five. At some theaters you can watch both parts in one day - if you're strong - or you may prefer an intervening overnight to let part one settle into your system and psyche, and it doesn't really settle very easily.
It's not accurate to refer to Shoah as a movie, because even though it's on film and is projected onto a screen, it's certainly not a movie-type movie. It's really not even a documentary; indeed it violates many basic rules of documentary filmmaking. It's being called an oral history, but that too, is inadequate. It does contain many bits and extended sequences of oral history, but in its entirety, the presentation, as edited, is a carefully constructed conglomerate of parts of those oral histories interspersed with pictures of places and things, all illustrative, all designed for a purpose, to leave an impression, to make a point. But what is the purpose, the desired impression, the point? The obvious is apparently not so obvious according to comments given by numerous viewers.
An oral history is an account related by someone orally, usually an older person. In times past, such accounts became part of tradition and the folk process, then were transcribed by shorthand and recorded on paper. Later preservationists used disc, then wire and audiotape. College students nowadays are often encouraged to replace research term papers with oral histories: having grandmother talk for an hour into the tape recorder about the years of the Great Depression, or having Uncle Harry ramble on at the microphone about his reminiscences of the Battle of the Bulge or the Korean War, while the audio cassette catches all. Such tapes become valuable documents - oral histories - containing bits of history together with and occasionally overshadowed by personal perspective. Today, oral histories have the added dimension of picture. The videotape records not only the words, but many telling facial expressions and eloquent body language as well.
Shoah is made up essentially of painstakingly edited oral and visual histories, together with supporting shots and occasional explanatory titles. Director/researcher/editor Claude Lanzmann presents the recorded comments of persons who survived the Nazi death camps and includes other eyewitnesses from the times and places involved. He seriously attempts to give viewers a reconstruction of what happened at Treblinka and Auschwitz by unfolding in stark recall man's classic inhumanity to man. Despite the gripping, informative, and tragic accounts of the unbelievable horror, the presentation labors under serious
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