UPDATED EVERY THURSDAY
Thursday January 2nd 2003
All content © New Journal Enterprises, 2002.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
REVIEWS   BY ANTONIA QUIRKE

Claude Lanzmann
Sobibor
Dir Claude Lanzmann
Claude Lanzmann came upon the story of the 1943 uprising of the Polish Sobibor concentration camp while researching his epic documentary Shoah.

The account of the uprising by Living Witness (Lanzmann’s term) Yehuda Lerner was so extraordinary that Lanzmann held back the story in order to make it into a separate film. In Sobibor, Lanzmann combines Lerner’s interview of 1979 with shots of contemporary Warsaw and Sobibor, but much of the film is simply Lerner’s testimony.

He tells of how he arrived at the camp, how he escaped the gas chamber by volunteering for work, how he helped plan and execute the uprising, killing a German officer, how the entire camp of 600 prisoners made a break for freedom through the wire under heavy machine-gun fire, about how half of these made it to the forest beyond the camp where they lived an anguished life until the end of the war.

Lerner speaks in Yiddish, and his testimony given through a French translator. The process is deliberately slow (Lanzmann could have simply subtitled the Yiddish) and hence unforgettable. Every act Lerner chooses to remember is drummed into our memories. It’s an effective technique – as though we were translating ourselves, keen for this man to unburden himself of his rationale for passing judgment and turning executioner on the 14th October 1943 at precisely 4pm.

The act of witnessing becomes trancelike – you become lost in Lerner’s voice.
He seems incredibly good natured, in his sports shirt and curls. His eyes are not dead. Only when the camers goes in close do you realise he might be in trouble. The side of his mouth twitches, making his face seem a little unbalanced, intensely anxious. This labour he underakes, this telling of the tale, is plainly to be filmed by Lanzmann and watched by us. Lerner does us a tough service, and Lanzmann proves himself (again) to be a sensitive and talented documentarian – one full of enabling anger, and a rigorous fidelity to the experience of bearing witness to the Shoah.

n Both Shoah and Sobibor are screening throughout January at the ICA, where Claude Lanzmann will be in conversation with the Jewish academic David Cesarani on January 17.