The second half of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) focuses on explicit details of how the Nazi's machinery of mass murder worked, on the industrialization and logistics of the business end of it. Lanzmann also focuses on just how incomprehensible the scale of violence was, how no one who had not seen it with their own eyes could believe that humans were capable of such inhumanity, how even victims mere moments from their death could scarcely believe it. And we end with stories of resistance and revolt.
Shoah doesn't deal with the "why" of the Holocaust, but the "how", and Lanzmann presses his interviewees - victims, witnesses, and perpetrators - on that "how" to explicit and horrifying detail. But this detail must be seen, must be known, must be believed, to truly never let it happen again, to be able to stand against genocide no matter where it takes place now, from the US's deportation machines to the murder of thousands of children in Gaza.
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Spine 663: Shoah Era 1
Claude Lanzmann was hired to make a 120 minute documentary about the Holocaust and turn it in within about 18 months. He did not do this. Instead, acknowledging the truth of the matter, that one could not begin to grasp the inhuman enormity of the Nazi's decimation of the Jewish people of Europe, Lanzmann spent the next decade interviewing survivors of the camps, non-Jewish Poles who lived and worked around the camps, Nazis who ran things, and other witnesses - over 350 hours of footage - and editing it down to the nine and a half hour documentary Shoah (1985) and a number of other shorter documentaries in the decades since.
Because of the emotional (and temporal) magnitude of the film we'll be spending the next three weeks covering this to better give it the time it deserves. Week one is on Shoah Era 1, the first four and a half hours of Shoah, week two will cover the rest of Shoah, and week three will cover the additional materials on the Criterion release including three additional shorter documentaries made by Lanzmann from his original footage.
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Spine 662: Safety Last!
With Safety Last! (1923, dir. by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor) the Criterion Collection brings us a fantastic introduction to Harold Lloyd only a few years after we introduced him to ourselves watching Grandma's Boy (1922) for a Patreon bonus episode. Safety Last! is a more fun movie than Grandma's Boy, not least of all because there's no Confederate apologia, and Criterion helps us contextualize Lloyd's career with a plethora of additional features including three shorts and the two episodes of The Third Genius, a 1989 career retrospective.
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Spine 661: Marketa Lazarová
František Vláčil's historical epic Marketa Lazarová (1967) is another example of what happens when an insane artist is at the right place at the right time to be given carte blanche: a breathtaking film stuffed to the brim with beautiful images that seems like it was an absolute nightmare to work on. Fortunately, we didn't have to help make the movie, we just get to watch it.
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Spine 660: Things to Come
A few months ago we were surprised to learn that HG Wells, the famed 19th century science fiction writer, survived long enough to comment on film adaptations of his work. This is a silly thing for us to be surprised by, because the man was only 66 when Island of Lost Souls, the movie that he commented on, came out. Just a few years later Alexander Korda hired Wells himself to adapt Wells' futurism work into Things to Come (1936), working with a crack team of art directors and artists including William Cameron Menzies as director, Vincent Korda officially acting as art designer, and a cadre of others including a mostly cut sequence by Hungarian experimental filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy. It's a beautiful film that looks at a future that Wells imagines is not a technocratic dystopia even though that's what he portrays.
The Adam Glass and John Patrick Owatari-Dorgan attempt the sisyphean task of watching every movie in the ever-growing Criterion Collection. Want to support us? We’ll love you for it: www.Patreon.com/LostInCriterion
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