Shoah The Four Sisters (E.)
Directed by Claude Lanzmann.
Featuring Paula Biren, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman and Hanna Marton. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from Eureka Masters Of Cinema. 273 mins
The final film of esteemed documentarian Lanzmann, was a surprising change of pace, a light-hearted reminiscence of young love. No, of course, it isn't, it's another Shoah. Like Edgar Reitz with the Heimats, once embarked upon the process of compiling a verbal history of the Holocaust, Lanzmann couldn't escape. The Four Sisters is four full-length interviews with Jewish women who made it through the Holocaust. They were filmed for, but not included in, the original nine and half hour Shoah. It is less a movie than it is a very comprehensive Extras feature. Or, if you prefer, it's testimony from four highly committed "crisis actors" who have stuck to their stories with unusual commitment and consistency.
Lanzmann accumulated over three hundred hours of footage for the original film. Imagine editing all that. More than that, imagine having to decide who didn't make the cut, deciding which tale was that bit more tellingly harrowing. How would it feel to spill out your darkest memories to him, only for it not to make it into the final nine-hour film?
That's what happened to the four ladies here. Biren, Elias, Lichtman and Marton tell their stories in four films entitled Baluty, The Hippocratic Oath, The Merry Flea and Noah's Ark. Each runs to about an hour though Ruth Elias gets 93 mins to recount being pregnant at Auschwitz and facing Dr Mengele. Lanzmann didn't do much with the footage. Mostly it is the women talking, sometimes in close up, with the occasional shot of Lanzmann asking the question.
And how can such a thing be reviewed? The 20th and 21st centuries haven't slacked in its efforts to overshadow the significance of the Holocaust with comparable horrors but it still stands apart. In 1985, the film came out to a world that still seemed capable of serious reflection, a firm rebuttal to the few Holocaust Deniers. Four Sisters emerges into a world where everybody's a denier of something, a world gorging itself on a pick'n'mix filter of reality. If you can convince yourself that we've been lied to for centuries about the earth being round then I guess you can jack yourself up into calling these four and half hours, and the three hundred and fifty hours of footage from which it was taken, as fake.
Lanzmann died last year the day after Four Sisters was released in French cinemas. And I can't help but wonder if, given the rise of fascism around the world today, his life's work hadn't ultimately been a failure. Shoah was supposed to be the film there was no coming back from, no weaselling out of, no argument against.
I have to say that when the two discs dropped through my letterbox and I didn't feel much need for more Shoah. I thought I'll just watch the one, out of sense of duty. Watching it I was struck by the power of its simplicity, how just sitting down and allowing people to talk about acts of insane evil seemed so oddly sane. Even though Lanzmann's gone, there must be scope for many more Shoah spin offs to be pulled from all that unused footage, and that's very reassuring.
Directed by Claude Lanzmann.
Featuring Paula Biren, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman and Hanna Marton. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from Eureka Masters Of Cinema. 273 mins
The final film of esteemed documentarian Lanzmann, was a surprising change of pace, a light-hearted reminiscence of young love. No, of course, it isn't, it's another Shoah. Like Edgar Reitz with the Heimats, once embarked upon the process of compiling a verbal history of the Holocaust, Lanzmann couldn't escape. The Four Sisters is four full-length interviews with Jewish women who made it through the Holocaust. They were filmed for, but not included in, the original nine and half hour Shoah. It is less a movie than it is a very comprehensive Extras feature. Or, if you prefer, it's testimony from four highly committed "crisis actors" who have stuck to their stories with unusual commitment and consistency.
Lanzmann accumulated over three hundred hours of footage for the original film. Imagine editing all that. More than that, imagine having to decide who didn't make the cut, deciding which tale was that bit more tellingly harrowing. How would it feel to spill out your darkest memories to him, only for it not to make it into the final nine-hour film?
That's what happened to the four ladies here. Biren, Elias, Lichtman and Marton tell their stories in four films entitled Baluty, The Hippocratic Oath, The Merry Flea and Noah's Ark. Each runs to about an hour though Ruth Elias gets 93 mins to recount being pregnant at Auschwitz and facing Dr Mengele. Lanzmann didn't do much with the footage. Mostly it is the women talking, sometimes in close up, with the occasional shot of Lanzmann asking the question.
And how can such a thing be reviewed? The 20th and 21st centuries haven't slacked in its efforts to overshadow the significance of the Holocaust with comparable horrors but it still stands apart. In 1985, the film came out to a world that still seemed capable of serious reflection, a firm rebuttal to the few Holocaust Deniers. Four Sisters emerges into a world where everybody's a denier of something, a world gorging itself on a pick'n'mix filter of reality. If you can convince yourself that we've been lied to for centuries about the earth being round then I guess you can jack yourself up into calling these four and half hours, and the three hundred and fifty hours of footage from which it was taken, as fake.
Lanzmann died last year the day after Four Sisters was released in French cinemas. And I can't help but wonder if, given the rise of fascism around the world today, his life's work hadn't ultimately been a failure. Shoah was supposed to be the film there was no coming back from, no weaselling out of, no argument against.
I have to say that when the two discs dropped through my letterbox and I didn't feel much need for more Shoah. I thought I'll just watch the one, out of sense of duty. Watching it I was struck by the power of its simplicity, how just sitting down and allowing people to talk about acts of insane evil seemed so oddly sane. Even though Lanzmann's gone, there must be scope for many more Shoah spin offs to be pulled from all that unused footage, and that's very reassuring.
