Whenever I’m asked to reveal my “favorite” film ― and be aware this happens rarely, because everyone who knows me understands that I’ve never been obsessed by cinema (as opposed to music and books) ― I find it difficult to answer the question.
This doesn’t owe to a paucity of viewing opportunities, as I’ve sat through my share of wretched movies, but rather lingering uncertainty about the meaning of the word “favorite.” and how we ever arrive at a “favorite” anything.
A better question to ask: “Roger, what are your most influential films?”
Thankfully, documentaries are eligible, or else the list would be quite brief: Reds, Animal House, maybe Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary Shoah ranks at or near the top of my influences list; a film this grueling could never be considered “favored” in the customary context of pleasurable entertainment.
Shoah is an oral history of the Holocaust that runs almost ten hours and demands supreme effort on the part of the viewer, a commitment extending somewhat beyond the typically vapid Hollywood blockbuster on date night.
That first experience with Shoah came in the spring of 1988. I’d been in Europe the previous year when the film was shown on public television (see below), and my mother videotaped it for me. For ten solid ten days, I set the alarm an hour early each morning and made my way through the film in bits and pieces before heading off to work.
Lanzmann’s relentless imagery has been with me ever since. Shoah was visceral, and essential for my understanding of the Holocaust. It is an unconventional, brutally effective documentary that depicts and describes historical events without the use of archival footage or reenactments.
During the 1970’s, Lanzmann began filming real people ― Jewish survivors, serenely acquiescent Poles and even (surreptitiously) an unrepentant German SS officer ― all of whom had lived through cataclysmic and unspeakably horrible events that primarily took place in areas of dense pre-war Jewish population, which during the Nazi occupation became dotted with planned centers of systematic slaughter.
Some of these people were participants, whether unwillingly or not.
Lanzmann filmed the memories and recollections in a dozen then-Communist locales in Poland and Eastern Europe, with occasional side excursions to Israel, Germany and elsewhere, as conforming to the post-war diaspora of victims (and perpetrators).
Shoah is organized into narratives woven together...Read more
