Claude Lanzmann’s Postscript to ‘Shoah’

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/arts/18iht-dupont18.html

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PARIS — The French film director Claude Lanzmann’s apartment is decorated with trophies and souvenirs. The latest is an Honorary Golden Bear, his lifetime achievement award from the Berlin film festival this winter.

There is a coffee table with books piled helter-skelter, and copies of Les Temps Modernes, the magazine founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Mr. Lanzmann, who was close to Sartre and closer still to Beauvoir (he lived with her for several years) is its editor in chief. On a wall crowded with photographs are a couple of lovely ones of Beauvoir.

This is not the study of a modest man. Lanzmann is a champion provocateur, best known as the director of the nearly nine-hour “Shoah” (1985). He is presenting his most recent work, “Le Dernier des Injustes” (The Last of the Unjust), out of competition at Cannes on Sunday. “I would have liked being in competition,” he said.

“The Last of the Unjust” is built on interviews he conducted during the filming of “Shoah” with Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, who was one of the heads of the Jewish Council at the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague. The council was a group set up by the Nazis as a mostly fictitious Jewish administration of the camp.

Mr. Lanzmann has an enormous physical presence in his films. He argues, insinuates, harangues — then pulls back and listens. Still barrel-chested at 87, he says that he suffers from sleeplessness: “I am an insomniac.”

He met Murmelstein in 1975 in Rome for what turned out to be a 17-hour interview, from which he fashioned the 3-hour-and-40-minute “Last of the Unjust.”

The film’s title was based on the way Murmelstein described himself, referring to André Schwartz-Bart’s book “Le Dernier des Justes” (The Last of the Just). He knew that his fellow Jews judged him harshly. “But he was a workaholic and he saved 121,000 Jews,” Mr. Lanzmann said.

At the beginning of the film, the two men meet against the background of Roman rooftops: the brilliant animated rabbi who ended his days in Rome and the more reserved, questing Mr. Lanzmann. At the end of the film, which takes viewers to the heart of the Nazi system, they are shown arm in arm on the Appian Way.

“I was 50; Murmelstein was 70,” Mr. Lanzmann recalled. “He impressed me. He was the first protagonist I filmed for ‘Shoah,’ but I didn’t know how to fit him into the film.

“I was fascinated by the Jewish Council because it was vital to understand what it was, who they were. Despite what others thought, I never thought they were collaborators.”

“The French collaborators had the same ideology as the Nazis,” Mr. Lanzmann continued. “They were anti-Semitic. Whereas those who were forced into their job had no choice. Murmelstein describes them as marionettes who had to pull their own strings.”

After the Anschluss — the German takeover of Austria — the rabbi was named to head the Emigration Center for Jews under Adolf Eichmann. The Nazi leadership “had one idea: Get rid of them, in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland,” Mr. Lanzmann said.

“In two years you went from a policy of repression, segregation and forced emigration to the Final Solution,” he added. “Within the concentration camp system each ghetto became an island. Murmelstein explains this, brilliantly. He refused to act as his predecessors had acted. He hated the Nazis and anticipated their moves.

“Eichmann created the organization and named him at the head because he was a talented organizer. When Theresienstadt was freed, he was accused of collaboration with the Nazis. There were a lot of imbeciles.

“He didn’t escape, he preferred prison, and was acquitted of all charges, but he was still resented because, contrary to his predecessors, he had refused to play the Nazi game.

“The Jews in charge wanted to believe in what they were told. The Germans need Jewish labor, and if we give them what they want we’ll be O.K.,” he said.

This turned out not to be so. “They killed all the dentists, and it happened that German soldiers had toothaches. They killed the furriers, and the SS Gruppenführer who had promised their wives a mink coat for Christmas had to apologize.”

Mr. Lanzmann has studied the history of the Jewish councils in the concentration camps. “These are wrenching accounts of those who committed suicide because they had to give up their men.”

During the long encounters in the film, the younger Mr. Lanzmann learns about events at Theresienstadt, and the contemporary Mr. Lanzmann revisits the work of the artists, those in the camp who left vivid drawings of the concentration camp world. “They were incredible, geniuses like Goya,” he said.

When Mr. Lanzmann went to Rome to meet Murmelstein, he was unknown and Murmelstein had no desire to talk about the past: “My second wife, half-Jewish German, convinced him. We filmed every day for two weeks.”

Discussing Margarethe Von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt,” a movie about the philosopher’s famous New Yorker articles on the Eichmann trial and the banality of evil, Lanzmann said, with a snort: “Eichmann was no mere bureaucrat!” He added: “I didn’t see Madame von Trotta’s film. I won’t see it. I think it must be heavy.” He admitted, however, that “People like that kind of film,” likening it to “Schindler’s List.”

Despite being out of competition in Cannes, he is glad to be there with his movie. “They are giving me a big show,” he said. “I think the film will be a hit.”

More regretfully perhaps, he added: “I would have liked to win, the same year, the Bear and the Palme,” referring to the top film honors in Berlin and Cannes.