Shoah (Attempt 1)

Had my first attempt at defeating Shoah. This film is a documentary about the holocaust which is 566 minutes (or about 9 and a half hours) long. So far I'm 2 hours, 15 minutes in (7h 30min left to go!)

The film is shot in a sombre, relaxed style which reminds me of Tarkovski's work. The film maker mercifully uses mostly interviews to tell his story. He speaks with Polish farmers who lived near Auschwitz and another death-camp town (whose name I didn't recognize) along with interviews of survivors and people who were more intimately involved (such as a train operator. He reveals that the Germans paid him in vodka which he required to be able to ignore the screams coming from his cargo. Other trains' operators were not so lucky.) These interviews are played over and intercut with footage of overgrown train platforms and forests that once housed mass graves, along with some cemetery memorials.

The interviews seem to be in a rough chronological order, first interviewing the train operator and asking survivors about conditions in the ghettos and on the train (apparently french Jews were delivered by passenger car, as opposed to the usual cattle-cars. They point out the grotesque irony of women applying makeup before disembarking at their death camp.) We'll see how far we progress in this manner. We've just started interviewing an official of some kind. He begs the filmmaker not to use his name and we see him being filmed with the aid of some surveillance van. There's reference to what was said at his trial. So far he has told about women mercy-killing their children. We'll see what else he has to say.

The film sports grainy footage and slightly shoddy subtitles. I'm mostly struck by the decay of information on display here. The film maker is sometimes annoyingly obsessed with details. Where exactly did they pile clothing? What did that Polish man mean by the finger-across-throat gesture? This obsession is understandable however when we see what he's up against. The Poles he interviews via a French translator, (cruelly extending the length of the film and) adding yet another layer of lossy translation that must be done. The survivors sometimes refuse to speak or give contradictory accounts. Everything he discusses has happened 30 or 40 years ago and is overgrown sometimes unto obscurity. This is all beside the point of course, but it's something I thought about.

I will continue with further installments when I can. I intend to see this in one shot, so to speak, not interrupting it with any other films from my lists.