I spent an entire day ensconced in the IFI cinema in Dublin in the 1990s to watch all 7 ½ hours of Syberberg’s extraordinary epic “Hitler, a Film from Germany”, from 1977. Susan Sontag had famously said of it that it was “one of the 20th century’s greatest works of art.”
Which had struck me at the time as sounding uncharacteristically woolly. But once you watch it you appreciate her choice of words. It’s not a film, or a documentary, a dramatic re-enactment, essay, opera, mime or theatrical production, and yet it draws on all those forms as a means of approaching its ungodly subject.
But it’s only now that I’ve finally summoned up the courage to sit down and watch all 9 ½ hours of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental “Shoah”, from 1985, documenting the holocaust.
It is, as it needs to be, constantly harrowing and as such is a much-needed antidote to something like Schindler’s List.
Filmed over 11 years, Lanzmann makes some remarkable choices. There’s no use of archive footage. Instead, he interviews absolutely everyone he can find and talks to them, calmly, in a perfunctory way, about what they can remember.
And one of the first things that strikes you is how young everyone is. This is the mid 1970s, barely 30 years after the IIWW, so many of the people he interviews are in their 40s, 50s and 60s.
He talks to some of the very few survivors of the holocaust, most of whom speak to him from their homes in Israel. To some of the casual witnesses who’d been living and working there in Poland, as the camps in Treblinka and Auschwitz came into being. And to a number of SS officers, whom he secretly films and records.
And because he understands how fundamentally important it is to document all of this, and to not allow his emotions interfere in that process. And because he’s prepared to spend 11 years doing it, and will only release the result in its entire 9 ½ hour form, the result is a film that’s quietly mesmerising. And cumulatively disturbing in its insistence of unhurriedly poring over all the details, one by one.
And the phrase that, inevitably, keeps returning is Hannah Arendt’s famous “the banality of evil”.
But one of the things that has changed over the past couple of decades is our viewing habits. Few of us would ever have actually got around to spend an entire weekend in the cinema watching all 9 ½ hours of a documentary on the holocaust, however much we might have intended to.
But watching a less than 10 hour documentary on one of the most important events in modern history is far less improbable today, given our current appetite for binge-watching all sorts of undeserving dross, which we’re more than happy to waste hours and hours doing.
Everybody should put aside 10 hours to watch Shoah. It’s appalling. And mesmerizing. And is one of, if not the most important documents of the 20th century.
Watch the trailer for Shoah here.
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