Claude Lanzmann's nine-and a-half hour film Shoah(1985) deals with the trauma, unsolved past by Holocaust. He never used the any kind of documents about Holocaust. Instead, he represented the past within the present. The film's primary focus is on a f...
Claude Lanzmann's nine-and a-half hour film Shoah(1985) deals with the trauma, unsolved past by Holocaust. He never used the any kind of documents about Holocaust. Instead, he represented the past within the present. The film's primary focus is on a few, very particular places that seen over and over. Place becomes a powerful metonymic visual substitute for the catastrophic past and is evoked, by Lanzmann, as a continued sign of disaster, even in present. And also he solved the limitation of visual presentation using interviews with his protagonists.
The visual impasses in Shoah are solved through speech. Thus while Lanzmann believes very strongly in a visual taboo, he does not uphold the same belief with speech. As an interviewee and a listener, Lanzmann lead the viewer through the lots of details and toward the Holocaust. Images are produced, but they are not iconic or filmic. The witnesses produce images of the past through anamnesis and view-as-listener produces images constructed from the narration. Thus vision is suspended on the surface of the film, but it resurfaces elsewhere in the imagination.
Lanzmann situate the film in the present and he well aware of complexities of memory. In fact. memory is a result but we oblige to mediate through the present to access to the memory. The way which consists of memory not only fuse and synesis the complex temporarily but recreate, remember, and re-present the vanished and burned, invisible past.
But even though I didn't deal with in this discussion, I need to point out favoritism in film. Shoah denounce Poles that is another victim by history by the name of victim, Jews. So We couldn't find Poles as a victim anywhere in the film. And Germans in the film depict so flat and typical.
Despite of the problematic elements, Shoah beyond the interest of the mass-media and historians, it created the 'alternative time and space' through reconstruction and transcendence of memory and the possibility of the filmic representation and expand the film language experimentally.