For many in the film world and beyond, Claude Lanzmann’s 566-minute documentary Shoah, first released in 1985, remains a milestone that has yet to be surpassed. Even Lanzmann himself, who went on to direct a handful of movies using footage that didn’t make Shoah’s original cut, would never again attain the heights, and existential depths, of an epic that explored the Holocaust with such profound candor and compassion. One doesn’t watch Shoah as much as one experiences it — most ideally, on the big screen over a two-day period — and the experience is often unforgettable.
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It therefore seems almost sacrilegious for another filmmaker to have combed through more outtakes from Shoah to make his own separate movie, but that’s exactly what happened with the new feature, All I Had Was Nothingness (Je n’avais que le néant — “Shoah” par Lanzmann), which was produced by the late auteur’s widow, Dominique.
All I Had Was Nothingness
And yet writer-director Guillaume Ribot not only does a respectful job here, creating a worthy behind-the-scenes documentary uniquely out of Lanzmann’s own words and images; he does so in a way that highlights the massive personal and logistical undertaking that Shoah necessitated. The result will never hold up to the real thing, and it never tries to. But Nothingness proves to be an insightful making-of about a movie masterpiece, offering up a 90-minute preview of what’s in store for the next nine hours.
Lanzmann, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 92, was a brilliant journalist, writer and filmmaker known for being highly confrontational, as well as highly egocentric. He’s front and center throughout the entirety of Ribot’s documentary, chain-smoking Gitanes as he traverses the globe from New York to Tel Aviv, and Germany to Poland, so he can interview those who experienced the Holocaust from all sides: the Jews who survived the unspeakable, the Nazis who perpetuated it, and the Polish bystanders who resided alongside death camps but continued to go about their lives as if nothing was happening (a subject also explored in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest).
Nowadays you can find any number of Holocaust docs simultaneously playing on various cable channels, along with hundreds of others readily available on Netflix, Amazon or YouTube. But back in 1973, when Lanzmann first began to track down WWII survivors and record their testimonies, the genre didn’t even exist. “There was no reality to film. It had to be created,” he says, in a voiceover performed by Ribot and taken verbatim from the director’s 2009 book, The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, an autobiography that in part details the grueling 12-year journey behind Shoah’s production.
The reality created by Lanzmann and his tiny crew — including the great cameraman William Lubtchansky, himself the son of Holocaust victims — was one where the horrors of the past were only revisited in the present. There is not a single shred of archive footage in Shoah, only interviews in which people speak about what they lived through. When we see images of concentration camps, we find them just as Lanzmann and his team did: as ruins in overgrown fields, surrounded by forests and farmlands. The “nothingness” of the new film’s title, also taken from the director’s book, refers to both the absence of material evidence about the Holocaust that was available at the time and the “allegorical experience” of making a movie “whose subject would be death itself.”
As an outsized personality Lanzmann rarely sold himself short, and he appears in Ribot’s film as a reporter/hero tirelessly pursuing a truth that keeps eluding him, suffering from all the travel, fatigue, budgetary issues (we learn that “not a single U.S. dollar” went into financing Shoah, despite the director’s attempts to raise funds there) and a ten-year-plus period of existential dread. While Lanzmann is barely seen in Shoah itself, most of the footage here turns him into the main attraction — something that the director, despite all his ego-tripping, may very well have objected to.
And yet for one familiar with the original oeuvre, it’s fascinating to witness the colossal effort and chutzpah it took to document events that were deliberately buried, or else forgotten, by those with no desire to relive such horrors, whether they were Jews or Nazis. Like a proto-Michael Moore, we see Lanzmann knocking on the doors of retired German men who once worked in concentration camps, recording their hazy, teary-eyed confessions with hidden video cameras and microphones. At one point he winds up getting caught and has to flee the scene, leaving expensive equipment behind.
We also see to what extent Shoah wasn’t just documented, but directed. For the famous sequence where Abraham Bomba — who had to be tracked down for years, from Brooklyn to Israel — describes cutting the hair of fellow Jews before they entered the gas chambers at Treblinka, it was Lanzmann’s idea to shoot the man’s testimony while he was working at a barber shop in Tel Aviv. He did so because he thought the repeated gestures would help Bomba more easily remember what happened, and the result is one of the most powerful sequences not only in Shoah, but perhaps in any movie, ever.
There are other moments where we see the filmmaker deliberately staging things. This includes the lengthy railway sequence — from which an image served as the film’s original poster art — in which a retired Polish train conductor pilots the same locomotive he once used to drive cattle cars of Jews to the camps. Lanzmann convinces him to hop aboard and recreate his old routine, renting a train “at great expense” and doing dozens of takes to get the sequence right. Is this, in fact, documentary or fiction? Lanzmann could have cared less. “The act of transmitting is all that matters,” he wrote in his memoir, and Ribot makes sure to repeat those words toward the end of his film.
If certain elements in All I Had Was Nothingness, such as the constant voiceover, are far from the aesthetic Lanzmann applied to his own work, Ribot’s documentary gives viewers an idea of the lasting power Shoah continues to have four decades after its release. At best, it could convince those who haven’t seen the original film to finally take the plunge. And for those without nine hours to spare, later Lanzmann efforts like The Last of the Unjust or the femme-centered The Four Sisters, are both shorter works that serve as memorable side pieces to Shoah itself. Like Nothingness, they are composed of footage Lanzmann shot during the decade he spent combing the world in “a race against death” that would be the culmination of his career, and a dark reassessment of our collective history.
