Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann)"l'll wait for morning, and for the Germans.''Not to say that movies that aren't nine hours don't have a lot to say, but it's certainly easier for a viewer to come up with a wealth of opinions when that's the running time. Also not to say that Shoah doesn't have a lot to say, it's just that when you have nine hours of a film... no, let me rephrase that... when you have nine hours of an experience, the experience really has such a wealth of time to speak for itself. The genius of Shoah is that yes it is about the holocaust, which it is pretty hard to argue against it being the greatest human tragedy and act of crime (that petty word doesn't even do it justice) against humanity, and yet it still somehow feels objective. I guess I mean it remains objective in that it allows you to reach your own personal understandings and feelings about such heavy emotional material. Now, like I said, it's very tough for me to come up with a statement other then "wow, that was amazing", but i'll give it a go.
What do you need to know going in? Shoah is a nine hour film (I sadly didn't have any time to watch it in one sitting, it took five for me) and it's about the holocaust. What I liked about Shoah is that it wasn't completely about death, it was in fact also about life. A lot of scenes were silent, and yet they spoke volumes with their imagery. The film asks simple questions (not necessarily jumping right to the main point) and through that we see a bigger picture. The people he interviews are storytellers... yes Lanzmann pushes some of them and also hides a camera at one point while talking to a Nazi official... I'm honestly not sure how I feel about that. At the end of the day, Lanzmann is telling a story. Documentaries are like narratives in that respect, they have stories and characters.
The fact that these are just ordinary people (the survivors) makes me think of the power of going through something so traumatic. These people tell stories better than some authors. It makes me think of this very famous piece of prose that ran in several New York papers, where a man who made it out of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001... he went home and just wrote down what he was feeling. It was powerful, the fact that an ordinary joe had such a traumatic first-hand experience and communicated it to others so effectively.
As you can see, Shoah really has me just sort or rambling (and yet I have less thoughts on this then I did other films in the MDC). I loved the film. It was just very emotional to watch at times. I still love how the movie, as I said above, also celebrates life. That is what is important. That is what we have to do. We have to understand, not spend all the time condemning.
Thanks for the dictation.