Old Masters. - Cannes Review 2001 - movie review

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Manohla Dargis

Lastly, the new Claude Lanzmann documentary demands more space than I have here because it stakes a claim on film history as well as on history writ large. Sobibor, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 Heures is comprised primarily of an interview Lanzmann conducted in 1979 with a Holocaust survivor named Yehuda Lerner about the uprising at the Polish extermination camp Sobibor, the only successful Jewish-prisoner insurrection of the war. The film is a model of rigorous, dialectical documentary practice: the older interview footage is interspersed with images of contemporary Poland and models of the camp itself, with the filmmaker pushing along Lerner's recollection with off-screen questions remarkable for their journalistic acuity and lack of sentimentalism. Lanzmann isn't interested in extracting pity from his viewers; for him, history is present, undeniable and bereft of palliatives. Lanzmann originally slated the interview for Shoah but decided that the subject was too important to fold into the larger work. He was right. The new film isn't just an epilogue to that landmark documentary, it's a rebuttal to the dominant mythology of Jewish acquiescence and martyrdom, and as such, a critique of turning history into the comforts of fiction. It's historiography with a vengeance.

Manohla Dargis is the Film Editor at LA Weekly.