Published: 16 July 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
CLAUDE LANZMANN’S SPECIAL genius was a spectacular brusqueness, which allowed him to reveal, as if with no effort at all, the patterns of thought that protect enormities under a cloak of niceties.
Sometimes he was faintly droll and mordant in how he went about doing this. Everyone who has seen the nine and a half hours of Shoah will remember the scene in which an old SS Unterscharführer at Treblinka named Franz Suchomel, who does not know that he is on camera, agrees to recount his history at the camp and says: “but don’t use my name.”
Lanzmann replies, “No, I promised. All right, you’ve arrived at Treblinka. …” The Unterscharführer begins to speak—and, in subtitles on the screen, his name and identity appear.
It is a little shocking to see the subtitles. You wonder for a flicker of an instant if you aren’t watching a crime take place, which is Lanzmann’s bald-faced lie to the old Nazi. But then, in that same flicker of an instant, you do recognise, if you have half a brain, that the crime in this particular case belongs to the Nazi, and not to the man interviewing the Nazi.
You might even find yourself shocked to have been shocked—shocked to have been confused even for a micro-moment about the rights and wrongs of manipulating an old SS man into revealing the scale of his criminality. Does the micromomentary confusion overshadow what the Nazi recounts?
Maybe it does, for its own micro-moment.
FULL STORY Homage to Claude Lanzmann
Photo: Inkwell Management
