Son of saul 201511/12/2022 The lens through which the film must be viewed and understood is likewise double. They move fluidly between citing survivors’ narratives and referencing film directors, between emphasizing our still-outstanding need to grapple with this history and our need to find a form adequate to this task. There is now a governing and simplifying tendency in critical and academic discourse that pits these two films against each other, where Shoah is celebrated while Schindler’s List is criticized for manipulating its subject and aesthetically and abjectly seducing its audience.įrom their interviews, it is clear that Nemes and Röhrig understand the ambition of their film through the terms and stakes of this debate about representability and the moral implications of technique. He went as far as saying that if Spielberg had simply reflected, he would not have made Schindler’s List he would have just made Shoah. Lanzmann lambasted Schindler’s List, calling it a “kitschy melodrama” that indecently transgressed the ban on depiction. For the most part, it engages the formal and emotional techniques of classical Hollywood cinema. Schindler’s List is a three-hour fictionalized drama based on a real person. Lanzmann is perhaps the chief advocate for the prohibition on representation based on his conviction that the Holocaust cannot be conveyed visually. Shoah is a nine-hour documentary whose governing formal choice is negative: it does not show any archival images or footage. The two films that now function as representatives in this debate are Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). This debate about the morality of film form has come to govern the conversation about representations of the Holocaust. For these critics, it is morally perverse to revert to techniques of aesthetic seduction when a film’s subject is of the gravest human concern. How could a film about the Holocaust be abject in its use of camera movement? Daney’s claim is that a film is itself abject when it engages cinematic strategies to entertain, to give false catharsis to, or otherwise “aesthetically seduce” its audience. The movement you must - obviously - be abject to make.” It might seem that abjection would be an effect of the scene’s terrible content, a woman committing suicide by throwing herself onto electric barbed wire. Three decades later, inspired by Jacques Rivette’s essay “On Abjection,” Serge Daney wrote an essay called “The Tracking Shot of Kap ò,” excoriating the Holocaust film Kap ò for employing “a simple camera movement was the one movement not to make. A film’s moral orientation is to be gleaned not from consideration of the story that it tells but through consideration of how it tells it: the angle of the camera, the tenor of the score, the place of a cut, the ratio of a screen. In 1959, film critic Luc Moullet wrote in Cahiers du cinéma that “morality is a question of tracking shots.” That same year, speaking of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, Jean-Luc Godard repeated this claim: “A tracking shot is a moral issue.” Against the intuitive thought that morality is a question of a film’s content, Moullet and Godard insist that morality is lodged in cinematic form. Everything was possible, literally everything.” So what can film do when everything is possible? Is it within film’s purview to represent all of what was conceived and realized in that time and place? If yes, at what point does such representation become obscene? If no, at what point does the refusal to represent become a strategy of moral evasion? In his memoir, writing against the idea that the Holocaust is inconceivable and rejecting the balm that such an idea provides, survivor Hermann Langbein asserts, “Nothing was inconceivable in Auschwitz. It also upends one’s hold on the nature of film itself, calling into question what film can or should do. Watching this feels like being delivered over to something inconceivable, something that bends one’s very hold on the world. All around him and filling out the screen are flames, shadows, and bodies: alive and dead, naked and uniformed, all wild with panic. As with the rest of the film, the camera is intent on Saul (Géza Röhrig), frantic in its pace and rapt in its focus. The soundscape is filled with crackling fire, gunshots, and a terrible range of human noises. IN THE MIDDLE of Lázló Nemes’s Son of Saul, a scene takes place in the center of the chaos surrounding a massive incineration pit as human beings are driven by other human beings to their death.
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