The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Outtakes (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series)

Product Description

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah’s innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes. The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann’s body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove-over 220 hours-of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann’s impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-à-vis the filmmaker’s posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume’s contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann’s filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation.In light of Lanzmann’s invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker’s complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

Review

There were some 220 hours of ‘outtakes’ that never made it into the 9 1/2 hours of Lanzmann’s monumental film. Lanzmann stated that he was tempted to destroy this filmic material because such a drastic gesture ‘would prove that
Shoah is not a documentary.’ This was a bizarre tribute to ‘art’ along with the supposed control over it by the ‘
auteur.’ It was also an insistence on a misleading binary logic that obscured the documentary and referential dimensions along with the role of many co-makers (notably, women and disparaged Polish interlocutors), as well as the nature of Lanzmann’s and his chief editor Ziva Postec’s own at times problematic and extensive editing of a film that disclosed much to its viewers about the genocidal effort of the Nazis and its effects on victims and survivors. The archive of what the editors aptly term the ‘not-yet-edited’ and the ‘never-to-be-edited’ raises important questions about the bases of Lanzmann’s decisions as well as his preferred method of eliciting or provoking traumatic reenactment. Readers may of course disagree about which contributions display the most critical insight, but they are all worth careful study and reveal how the film was not simply Lanzmann’s but the product of many human, sometimes all-too-human hands.
Construction of Testimony is an extremely valuable book that does not undermine the status of, but does critically analyze and situate dialogically an ‘iconic’ film whose artistry is evident but whose paths not taken may still stimulate both aesthetic and historical inquiry for its viewers and commentators. — Dominick LaCapra ―
author of Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts Published On: 2020-02-05

This superb anthology offers provocative new insights into Claude Lanzmann’s pioneering testimonial project. The authors’ close studies of the
Shoah outtakes provide revelations on nearly every page of their complex, lucidly argued, at times incisively critical essays. Any future assessments