Film
Seitz, Michael H.
HIWF MichaelH. Seitz Witnesses Shoah (which means "annihilation" in Hebrew), Claude Lanzmann's monumental nine-and-a-half-hour film on the Holocaust, is wholly different in approach and impact...
...It tries to impress the viewer not by offering emotionally wrenching spectacle, but through the accretion of detail...
...Lanzmann wants to refute the notion that the Holocaust is a thing of the past, so he focuses on the present...
...One, a barber, worked in the gas chamber, shearing the hair from the heads of bewildered women just before they died...
...It is comic book-style swordplay and sorcery with a feminist tinge, starring newcomer Brigitte Nielsen (red-headed Sonya) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Kalidor, the swordwield-ing high priest...
...A former SS officer at Treblinka, apparently still proud of his privileged insider's knowledge, didactically corrects Lanzmann's estimate that 18,000 humans were disposed of daily at the camp—"not 18,000 a day but 12,000 to 15,000, and we had to work half the night...
...He shows us no dazed and pathetically emaciated victims of starvation in the concentration camps, no mass graves stacked with human remains...
...Sitting through *a nine-and-a-half-hour film is bound to be something of an ordeal (in New York exhibition it will be screened in two parts on alternating nights), but Shoah's content and composition will hold the attention of most viewers, while provoking more thought than even serious moviegoers are accustomed to...
...The man who dispatched death trains from the Polish ghettos to the gas chambers denies any knowledge of the "final solution," while admitting that a large part of his job involved routing "special trains" to vacation resorts and concentration camps...
...a beautiful river that once was choked with human ashes...
...Their testimony, surreptitiously taped and recorded by hidden video equipment, is utterly appalling...
...Lanzmann shows us a lovely Lithuanian forest where young trees now cover the mass graves of Jews of the Vilna ghetto...
...Seitz Witnesses Shoah (which means "annihilation" in Hebrew), Claude Lanzmann's monumental nine-and-a-half-hour film on the Holocaust, is wholly different in approach and impact from other motion picture treatments of the subject...
...a lush, sunny meadow, surrounded by woods, where the Treblinka death camp once stood...
...The film chooses not to explore the social forces responsible for its heroine's surprisingly harsh sentence, opting instead for weepy melodrama...
...Pretty dumb, but not a bad specimen of its kind...
...The most poignant testimony comes from Jewish survivors who were assigned to the death camps' "special details...
...Fine performances by Michel Piccoli, Nicole Garcia, and Anemone...
...Instead, we see those who witnessed the crimes and hear their testimony...
...Auschwitz," the SS veteran explains, "was a factory," while Treblinka was merely "a primitive production line of death...
...Polish peasants whose lands abutted the death camps tell how they minded their own business and worked their fields while the screams of dying Jews came from nearby cattle cars and incinerator smokestacks filled the air with the stench of burning flesh...
...Some of the film's most extraordinary interviews are with Nazis whom Lanzmann seems to have persuaded that they could make important contributions to the historical record...
...Shoah's effectiveness derives in great part from Lanzmann's awesome research (drawing on the work of Raoul Hilberg, who appears prominently in the film...
...That process, which accounts for the film's unusual length, succeeds in conveying a rare understanding of what happened and how...
...Not all of Shoah's witnesses are so candid...
...U Hits and Misses Peril A psychological murder-thriller from France, written and directed with style and unusual intelligence by Michel Deville (Dossier 51, Voyage en Douce...
...Violent action, touches of humor, fantastic art direction, and a happy ending...
...A couple of Chelmno churchgoers are asked, "Why do you think this happened to the Jews...
...Still, the characters are complex, and Miranda Richardson delivers a striking portrayal of the ill-fated barmaid...
...Their jobs enabled them to see and hear the extermination process...
...Because they were rich," they reply, and in expiation for the crucifixion of Christ...
...Although it affected me profoundly, Shoah is the only Holocaust film I've seen that has not brought me to tears...
...Peril offers an interesting play on the themes of seeing and knowing within a set of enigmatic relationships...
...The raw material—some 350 hours of interviews in several countries—has been fashioned into an artful motion picture...
...Red Sonya This is not, as the title might suggest, a leftist motion picture...
...because they performed those jobs, they survived...
...Others were forced to dispose of human remains: hauling corpses to the ovens, cleaning out the ashes for disposal, crushing unburnt bones...
...And we visit the sites that figured in the process of annihilation, viewing them not as they were then but as they are now...
...There is a haunting, painful incongruity between the present serene beauty of these sites and the horrors they once witnessed...
...Dance with a Stranger An engrossing, speculative reenactment of the events and motives that led an English barmaid to murder her young lover and become, in 1955, the last person to be sentenced to death in Britain...
Vol. 49 • November 1985 • No. 11
