The Construction of Testimony

Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Outtakes

Michel Vrana, Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, Markus Zisselsberger

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780814347355
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Olocausto

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah's innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes. The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann's body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove—over 220 hours—of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann's impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-à-vis the filmmaker's posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume's contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann's filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation. In light of Lanzmann's invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker's complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

1

Inside the Outtakes

A History of the Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Lindsay Zarwell and Leslie Swift

BERGSON: I said “What are you going to do about it? . . . Surely you don’t say that the government of the United States is going to do nothing? I am one individual here, a foreigner, and I know that I am going to do something. What good it will do, I don’t know, but I know I am going to do it.” . . . And, I went out and I called all our active people—our little group of Palestinians, and all the Americans, Jews and non-Jews—. . . . And I made a speech that evening which in essence said that from now on, we are going to get up in the morning and go through the day and go to bed at night trying to do something to save the Jews of Europe. Unfortunately we did not succeed. We discovered to our horror that life went on without much change.

LANZMANN: This was in 1942?

BERGSON: This was November 1942.

—Peter Bergson (aka Hillel Kook)

Nearly thirty-six years after Peter Bergson’s interaction with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Claude Lanzmann filmed an interview with Bergson for Shoah in an effort to document American responses to the Holocaust. Bergson was an activist who organized the “We Shall Never Die” pageant and made bold publicity moves aimed at influencing American policy in desperate hope of saving the Jews of Europe. His passionate testimony, however, did not fit within the scope of Shoah as a completed film and remained uncut and unused. Lanzmann’s interest in American responses was one of the unknown subjects discovered in the contents of the hundreds of reels of Shoah outtakes now archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

The Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection at the USHMM is one of the richest audiovisual sources of Holocaust history. This archive of rushes consists of the extraordinary testimony and location footage that was not incorporated into the monumental nine-and-a-half-hour film Shoah, which weaves together dozens of testimonies to describe in meticulous and devastating detail the step-by-step machinery of the destruction of European Jewry. Almost immediately after the release of Shoah in 1985, critics hailed it as “a sheer masterpiece,”1 “an act of witness,”2 and a “monument against forgetting.”3 Today, it is still widely regarded as “the most ambitious work ever made examining the Nazi genocide.”4

Claude Lanzmann and his trusted research team spent nearly twelve years searching for Holocaust survivors, perpetrators, eyewitnesses, and Holocaust scholars, and captured over 220 hours of film footage.5 The filmed interview subjects are younger—their memories twenty years closer to the events of the Holocaust—than the witnesses in the major oral history video projects that started in earnest in the 1990s. Few other documentarians took the risk to record, for example, members of Einsatzgruppen units recounting their experiences of killing thousands of Jews,6 or the morally complicated stories of Judenrat survivors.7 Lanzmann as an interviewer was sharply focused, intense, confrontational, and emotionally charged, and so are the outtakes. The length and depth of his interviewing approach resulted in powerful responses from Holocaust witnesses.

The USHMM acquired the collection of outtakes, which is co-owned with Yad Vashem, in late 1996. Michael Berenbaum, then-director of the USHMM Research Institute, and Raye Farr, former director of the USHMM Permanent Exhibition and now-retired director of the USHMM Film Archive, negotiated the acquisition with Lanzmann at the suggestion of Raul Hilberg. Hilberg, an eminent Holocaust historian, had remained close to Lanzmann after being interviewed by him for Shoah in January 1979. Following a review screening of the Shoah outtake reels in Paris in 1996, Berenbaum and Farr emphasized the high quality of the testimonies, describing them as interviews with “persons of vital historical significance, uniquely placed eyewitnesses to major events.”8 Their written report was crucial in making the case to USHMM stakeholders to support the purchase of such a large and complex collection comprised of various types of media, stored in France under unsuitable conditions. The summary written by Berenbaum and Farr in 1996 remains accurate today:

We know of nothing available on the subject at this time that equals their scope in probing the difficult issues of human behavior and personal choices during the Holocaust. . . . Lanzmann’s deliberate attempt to pull each witness into a re-living of the events—as opposed to a re-telling—has created a series of voyages into the place and the time and the pain and the paradox of Holocaust events, of Holocaust remembering. . . . On some levels they are priceless.9

The negotiations that resulted in the acquisition were not without complications, but, in the end, the USHMM received thousands of original films with corresponding sound tapes, negative logs, interview summaries, and transcripts.

It is important to reiterate that the Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection consists only of outtakes—that is, the scenes that were shot in the course of making Shoah but were not used in the final version. Most of the film material consists of Lanzmann’s penetrating interviews with witnesses, but there are also dozens of reels of so-called location footage—illustrative scenes of the forest in Poland, for example, or of the railroad tracks leading up to the gate at Auschwitz—shot by some of France’s most skilled camera operators, recruited by Lanzmann to work on the project.10

The sheer size and scope of the Shoah outtakes collection made it a daunting archival project from the very beginning, and it has been challenging to manage the analog materials and obtain the funds necessary to keep preservation work on track. However, the USHMM staff strongly committed to safeguarding the archive of Lanzmann’s signature cinematic achievement and undertook the extensive, complicated, and expensive work (over a million dollars to date) over the course of twenty years to reassemble the film materials. Now, nearly all of the Shoah interview and location outtakes fully available for research and freely accessible for viewing on the internet, accompanied by original and/or translated transcripts.11

Scope of Materials

Three large shipping containers, containing two tons of film materials, arrived at the USHMM collections storage facility on January 21, 1997. The delivery contained such diverse materials as film negatives, sound tapes, and rushes, the corresponding summaries and transcripts of the major interviews, and handwritten logs of the negative rolls. Our first priority was to unpack, inventory, and arrange the elements, which included several types of original materials: (a) picture content on 16mm silent color negatives; (b) field recordings on quarter-inch sound tapes; (c) 16mm film prints with accompanying magnetic soundtracks created for production and editing purposes, (d) negative trims; and (f) paper items such as transcripts and logs. By the summer of 1997, the collection had been accessioned, checked for damage, compared against content lists and organized numerically on new shelving specially constructed at the offsite facility. A new film archivist staff position was created to provide the expertise needed to evaluate, preserve, and catalog the Shoah outtakes, and to supervise the technical requirements for lab work.

It became apparent relatively quickly that we would need to overcome many obstacles in order to archive the materials. We had no way to view the picture content in order to make preservation decisions without jeopardizing the original camera negatives. No names of witnesses were included in the film logs or on the canisters of negatives; instead, the labels included the film manufacturer’s edge code number. Most critically, we did not have access to a master log of the Shoah outtakes that would allow us to correlate a name, place, and date with corresponding edge code information. Given the tremendous volume of items, we found ourselves confronted by an enormous puzzle.

We attempted to gain some insight into the organization of the analog materials by tracing the methodology of film production employed by Lanzmann in the late 1970s. The film crew in each country where filming for Shoah took place (Germany, Poland, Israel, and the United States) consisted of a cinematographer equipped with a camera and 16mm color film, a sound technician with recording equipment and tape, and an interpreter, which was required in cases where Lanzmann did not speak the interviewee’s language (for whatever reason, Lanzmann employed only women for this work).12 Each member of the crew contributed a different and vital component to make up the whole.

The method for clandestine recording was markedly different and yet still required the skills of several crew members. In order to record reluctant interviewees (usually perpetrators or others complicit in Nazi crimes) without their knowledge, Lanzmann concealed a video camera and sound wiring under his clothing to capture a conversation. The distinctive appearance of these clandestine interviews will be familiar to anyone who has seen Shoah.13 Camera equipment was stowed in a purse or bag, usually carried by the interpreter, while the technicians received and recorded the video signal from the back of a Volkswagen van parked on a street outside the house where the dialogue was taking place. This black and white video transmission was later copied onto 16mm film and magnetic soundtrack.

Handwritten log showing one canister with original camera negative identified only by edge codes. (Used by permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)

Whether hidden or openly shot, the cameramen employed a range of camera angles; a frame could show the interviewee or Lanzmann, or sometimes both, or sometimes just a place. Clapperboards at the beginning of each picture reel were used to synchronize sound and provide information such as the working title of the film (“Holocauste”), roll numbers, and the names of the cinematographer and the interviewee. Despite our hopes that the method of production might help us unlock the key to the organizing principle behind the materials, the sheer length of the production schedule and number of people involved resulted in little consistency in the administrative systems used to organize the project and therefore hindered our efforts to identify a pattern. Another wrinkle came from the fact that quarter-inch sound tapes run slightly longer than the film rolls, meaning that the otherwise parallel interview contents are actually not equivalent in roll numbering. Moreover, the sound technician and camera operator each recorded different information on the respective canisters. For example, only the word “Chelmno” appears on a sound carton ...