Shoah by Sue Vice (review)

Critical writing on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) has often stressed the film's alleged ambivalence towards visual representation. Much commentary has centred on Lanzmann's refusal to show his subject, the industrialized murder of the Holocaust era, and his avoidance of archival images. Sue Vice's amply illustrated study questions the preoccupation with iconoclasm in Shoah criticism by arguing that the film revives the past visually as much as through dialogue. Following Lanzmann, Vice defines the film's project as 'reincarnating', rather than illustrating, the atrocities, and notes that this relies on what we see no less than on what we hear. One aspect of the book's contribution to the vast scholarship on Shoah is its attention to critically overlooked elements of the mise en scène of the present that function as 'traces and resurrections' of the past (p. 51). Auschwitz survivor Filip Müller re-enacting wartime gestures by SS officer Peter Voss; the chance image blemish that obscures Treblinka guard Franz Suchomel's eyes; the exhaust fumes emitted by the film crew's van in Chelmno: these and other unobtrusive yet ambiguously resonant features close the distance between the scenes that we witness and those from the Holocaust years that we imagine. Equally perceptive are Vice's analyses of correspondences between image and narration. Witnesses' accounts of the methods of mass killing are juxtaposed, she points out, with oblique 'visual correlatives' (p. 81) that 'imply the world of the past' (p. 13), such as the sunlight in the Tel Aviv barber's shop where Treblinka survivor Abraham Bomba recalls suffering in the Polish heatwave of September 1942. In Vice's precise and persuasive reading, then, which echoes Lanzmann's explicit preference for small details over generalities, the filmic image in Shoah is not anti-representational, but rather a means of collapsing temporal difference, of restaging and revivification. In line with her emphasis on the film's status as an auteurist production, Vice draws extensively on Lanzmann's pronouncements on the project. The volume contains one of the first reconsiderations of Shoah in the light of the illuminating hundred-page account of its creation in Lanzmann's memoir Le Lièvre de Patagonie (2009), although discussion of aspects of the finished film that diverge from the director's description of it might have further nuanced Vice's judicious engagement with his commentaries. New light is also thrown on Shoah's preoccupations by Vice's remarks on footage that was shot for the film but discarded during editing. Among the out-takes is a confrontation with former Einsatzgruppe member Karl Kretschmer, which Vice reads as confirming that Lanzmann seeks from perpetrators not new facts but 'performative enactments' of long-ago events (p. 66). The book concludes, fascinatingly, by exploring how Shoah can now itself be viewed as an archive of multiple generations of footage, much of which depicts the world behind the Iron Curtain, and became a touchstone for subsequent film-making. In a feat of concision, Vice provides in under a hundred pages both an accessible introduction to a nine-and-a-half-hour-long film and a significant contribution to research, demonstrating that the abundant writing on Shoah has not yet exhausted its meanings.