Boswell, Matthew. “Shoah” in: Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film. Palgrave Macmillan,

In this chapter, Matthew Boswell discusses Claude Lanzmann’s theoretical approaches to Holocaust representation in relation to the interviewing methodology demonstrated in his 9.5 hour documentary Shoah. Boswell highlights Lanzmann’s position as a defender of “Holocaust piety,” which is the notion that the Holocaust can never be truly represented and that any attempt to comprehend and communicate its “horror in the absolute degree” should be rejected (148). Contrasting Shoah’s indirect, tangential representation of the Holocaust with more directly representational works such as Night and Fog, Boswell acknowledges that Shoah indeed exemplifies Lanzmann’s paradoxical theory, which claims that one can reach a more profound understanding by resisting to understand it (149). However, Boswell also suggests that Lanzmann’s theory “does not always tally with his practice” (153), and it is most apparent in his interview with Holocaust perpetrators, notably that with the former SS officer Franz Suchomel. Noting his awareness of “film-making practice as a form of persecution,” Boswell focuses on Lanzmann’s use of the camera to inflict violence, to “figure the cinematic and reputational death” of Suchomel (157). While implying that Lanzmann’s “provocative and impious” interviewing methodology contradicts his defense of Holocaust piety, Boswell convincingly points out the problem of othering, caricaturing the perpetrator in Shoah and his “refusal to see any human continuity between Nazi criminals and our lives in the present” (157).

Author of this entry: Chihhen Chang

Boswell, Matthew. “Shoah”, in: Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film. (Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 147-158.