The Rites of Responsibility: The Cinematic Rhetoric of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985)

Geller | The Rites of Responsibility: The Cinematic Rhetoric of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) The Rites of Responsibility: The Cinematic Rhetoric of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) Jay Geller Vanderbilt University Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's extraordinary "documentary" of the Holocaust, consists of interviews with surviving victims, bystanders, and perpetrators as well as visits to the killing fields as they exist today. The film is known, however, almost as much for its length of nine-and-a-half hours as it is for its content. In making Shoah, Lanzmann and his crew shot more than 350 hours offilm over aperiod ofsome fouryears. Even limiting the project to this vast sum of film required extensive planning and selection . After another five years of effort, the film was edited down to its final screening time. Lanzmann admits that some of that original footage consisted of setting up scenes and botched shots that were easily excised, but that much "magnificent work" also found its way to the cutting room floor.1 How did the director and the editors, Ziva Postee and Anna Ruiz, choose what and what not to show on the screen? Among the scenes removed were interviews with several members of the Polish resistance (as well as with additional Warsaw ghetto fighters); Lanzmann has justified their exclusion by arguing that they did not have sufficient filmic presence.2 Inclusion was guided, Lanzmann states in his Cahiers du Cinéma interview, by how well a scene comported with his idea of the film's "general architecture"—the exact nature of which he never explicates .3 He has also discussed how he structured the section devoted to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz about the themes ofknowledge/ignorance, deception, and resistance. Yet the problematic which Lanzmann repeatedly returns to in his own commentaries on his film—as well as echoed in much of the critical literature, especially the work of Shoshana Felman—is witness: the problematic ofwitnessing an event whose telos was to eliminate all witness.4 The film neither illustrates nor mimetically represents that which was to have been witnessed: there is no archival footage, no docudramatics. Nor does it function merely to transmit the witness of others, of those interviewed; rather it itself acts like a witness. The film bears witness; it testifies for the dead, for those whom Primo Levi called the true witnesses of the Holocaust.5 It attempts to incarnate them, to bring them back alive. The film bears witness, because the Shoah, like all traumatic experiences, was never actually witnessed as such—nor was it ever integrated into the memory, history, or life-experience ofmodem Euro-Americans.6 Further, the Shoah as an event could not be experienced by any one individual since by its very nature it was experienced from incommensurable perspectival positions: those who see but do not understand (victims), who see but overlook (bystanders), who see but try to hide/render invisible (perpetrators). The film acts out the trauma by bringing these witnesses together—and those oftwo others, the filmmaker/ narrator/interviewer/inquirer Lanzmann and his alter-ego, the historian Raul Hilberg—before the audience. The film would make each member of the audience bear witness. Yet the bystanders, too, bore witness. In the Cahiers du Cinema interview Lanzmann refers to the Poles as the "les témoins," the witnesses.7 How do the filmgoers then not become like these bystanders? There is no natural and necessary relationship between knowledge and action, between knowledge and responsibility for that knowledge. Moreover, since the audience experiences the montage of witness in time, its members do not have a synchronic tableau (neither vivant nor mort) before them; they can assume no godlike perches from which each can observe the clash of testimony, watch the false testimony discorroborated. Rather the film educates its audience about how to become a certain kind of witness. Since it is the individual who belies the attempt to erase, who becomes the exception that proves and subverts the rule of silence, so, like the individual survivors whose testimony is heard, the viewers are to become such individuals. The film's heuristic principle derives from an aspect of Lanzmann's background that seems to have...