Shoah

     Claude Lanzmann's film on the Holocaust, Shoah, is not by any stretch of the imagination a weepie, but there are several moments in the film showing people breaking down in tears and the viewer might be inclined to join them. These tears seem very different from those extracted at the end of Schindler’s List. This isn’t because director Claude Lanzmann is any less manipulative than Steven Spielberg, as we might wonder if one of the problems of many a Holocaust film is that they have been so afraid of the manipulative that they have lost out on the affective. Recent works including Laszlo Nemes’s Son of Saul and Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest have been careful, considerate works, just as at the other extreme Mark Herman’s The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas has been uselessly sentimental in its determination to turn the Holocaust into a drama of tearful hindsight. Spielberg’s film is a lot better than Mark Herman’s but, by the end, it can’t resist an emotional payoff, opening fully the taps in Schindler’s closing speech and the survivors laying stones on the eponymous character's grave in a closing colour scene. 

      Yet if Herman and Spielberg have sought to access the emotions, and Nemes and Glazer to limit their easy expression, Lanzmann finds them on the way to somewhere else. When camp survivors Abraham Bomba and Filip Muller, and Jan Karski (a member of the Polish government in exile) collapse in Shoah, the director can hardly have expected this, since others he interviews whose experiences are no less harrowing (Simon Srebnik, Rudolf Vrba, and Richard Glazar) show no sign of such emotion in their recollections. But we can see in Shoah that central to its greatness and why we can understand Lanzmann’s wish for it to be viewed as a work of art, rests on its affective range, the complexity of feeling it extracts while attending chiefly to the details of the extermination camps. It might be a nice idea that people can find compassion in their hearts but Itzhak Zuckermann, a Warsaw ghetto-resistant fighter with the puffy face of a man who drinks, reckons, “if you could lick my heart, it would poison you.” The film isn’t afraid of risking that poisonousness yet it also manages to convey hearts that have been broken in ways that give almost a new meaning to the term heartbreak.

        Yet Muller’s broken heart and Zuckermann’s poisoned one are quite different things, and when we look at Muller forexample, in contrast to Zuckermann, we see in Muller a man who doesn’t seem broken at all, even if his heart has been broken as he expresses with such dismayed force, such human bewilderment, how he worked in the Sonderkommando and where his survival was predicated on doing his job well — on making sure the gas chambers ran smoothly and that the bodies were burned promptly. This was of course, an intolerable job at the best of times, but the worst of them was when he was in the room where everyone was expected to undress in preparation for the gas chambers. These were fellow Czechs, and “most of them refused to follow the order. Suddenly, like a chorus, they all began to sing. The whole ‘undressing room’ rang with the Czech national anthem, and the Hatikvah [the Israeli national anthem]. That moved me terribly…” At this moment, he finds himself unable to control his emotions as we might assume he was unable to contain them that day many years earlier. It becomes not just an emotional collapse but perhaps a temporal one also, as thirty years become compressed into time past that becomes time present. 

     This is central to Lanzmann’s project — not the tears that come but the temporal pressure that refuses the typical means of separation: archival footage that shows us this is the past, and the voiceover that can contextualise it. Instead, Lanzmann seeks to put the past in the present that itself will become past not because history is so clearly demarcated by decades, but because that temporality is materiality: it is still alive in the voice of the survivors, in the aghast, sometimes ruined, sometimes quizzical, faces, and in the remnants of the camps as they are today. Some of them are still largely intact, like Auschwitz, while at others almost nothing remains. Chelmno can seem from this perspective especially useful to Lanzmann’s project: a camp with only two survivors and with very little to see years afterwards, as the Germans destroyed evidence of its existence. Lanzmann starts with Chelmno, in the middle of Poland, and with Srebnik, who was in his early teens, someone who survived a bullet to the head. Lanzmann initially shows him on a small boat, being rowed along the river as he sings: the locals knew him to have a beautiful voice. 

      The image brings to mind the German Romantic tradition and also Werner Herzog’s work, a director who did more than most to rescue Romanticism’s continuation from Nazi aesthetics. There may be one of history’s most horrible ironies at work in such a moment, with the film registering the sort of tranquil beauty of the forests and rivers that was eulogised by Hitler and Heidegger, by demagogues and philosophers. Bronte Wells quotes Goebbels: “every time has its Romanticism, its poetic presentation of life -– ours does as well. It is harder and crueler than the earlier version, but it is just as romantic. The Steel Romanticism of our time manifests itself in intoxicating actions and restless deeds in service of a great national goal...We are all more or less romantics of a new German form.” (‘Nightmarish Romanticism: The Third Reich and the Appropriation of Romanticism’) A season of mellow fruitfulness became a season in hell and for Srebnik, the camps were just a continuation of what he had suffered in more urban form in the ghettoes of Lodz. “I was 13 and all I’d ever seen were dead bodies.” And there he is shown now in the Romantic tradition that may partly have been responsible for all but killing him. Lanzmann asks Srebnik to describe the terrors he underwent in the most tranquil of present environments and it creates a haunting counterpoint, but also an uncanny fear. The viewer watches what might in another context be regarded as the Green World — the term Northrop Frye offers to describe how in Shakespeare’s plays, characters retreat from the real world into forests and woods that have an enchanting, often magical element. “The archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire,” Frye says, “not as an escape from ‘reality,' but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate.” (Anatomy of Criticism) 

     Lanzmann offers it as the deepest of disenchantments and for the greatest of contrasts. If camp terrors could happen here, where couldn’t they happen? It isn’t only that Lanzmann has made a 9h 23 min film that refuses to return to the past temporally, all the better to propose that we cannot assume the horrors have gone away. He also opens the film in environs that add to this sense of envelopment. It may have all happened in the past, but what has changed socially, economically and psychologically that will guarantee it won’t happen again, and where could one escape to so that they would at least avoid the worst? Lanzmann closes off both time and space by refusing to leave the event in the past but focuses on it in the present, in the faces and words of those interviewed, and proposes that it can exist no matter how green the world might ostensibly be.

        Writing rather carelessly on the film, Pauline Kael reckoned Lanzmann’s close-ups were “tyrannically close — invasions of a face” and sees this as a sign of an amateur. “….To put it plainly, not everyone who has the dedication to make a film on a great theme is a great moviemaker.” (New Yorker) But whatever Lanzmann's skill or otherwise, the contrast between the long shots of landscapes and close-ups of faces captures well a sense that we can never get close enough to the past that these faces contain, nor far enough away from the atrocities that the film talks about. Lanzmann’s film may be crude by the conventions of a film language based on establishing shots, medium shots and close-ups, but hemanages to convey a permeating density, one that some might see as an attempt to apportion blame — but more succeeds in proposing moral decency doesn’t work when the circumstances are beyond almost any boundaries of good and evil. Clearly, there is an enormous difference between Muller and Franz Suchomel, the former a twenty-year-old Jew transported to Auschwitz and forced to accommodate the gassings and burnings, and a German who worked in Treblinka and who can claim when he arrived in the camp that it was working at “full capacity!” It was an industrious camp, processing bodies at an enviable rate, but with the most disgusting of consequences. “Because there were so many dead that couldn’t be got rid of, the bodies piled up around the gas chambers and stayed there for three days. Under this pile of bodies was a cesspool three inches deep, full of blood, worms and shit.” Suchomel claims it was so awful that “no one wanted to clean it out. The Jews preferred to be shot rather than work there.” 

        Suchomel might seem the most villainous of figures, but the main reason Lanzmann can interview him is that while he was convicted in the 1960s, it was for accessory to murder rather than murder. In a strict sense, Muller was an accessory to murder too, but while Suchomel was a supporter of the Nazi regime with a strong allegiance to the party, Muller was a victim forced into acts of relative perpetration so that he could survive. If Muller’s work had dried up, he would have found himself in the chamber and the oven as well. What else could he have done, as if forcing upon the viewer the question what would they do? While Kael sees Lanzmann’s film as a Jew pointing a finger at the Gentile world and crying, “You lowlifes — you want to kill us!”, this suggests more Woody Allen than Lanzmann — a name she invokes earlier in her piece when talking about the Polish peasants resembling “Woody Allen’s convention of village idiots.” If we make much of Kael’s review, it is because she was one of the few dissenting voices when the film came out — which wouldn’t be a problem in itself. We can agree with Kael that making a film on so dark a subject and shooting for eleven years in fourteen countries doesn’t automatically result in a work of art. But it doesn’t help when the critic insists on putting words in Lanzmann’s mouth and conjuring up Allen’s comedies. It is not so much that Shoah blames the Gentiles for the destruction of the Jews; more the human’s relationship with other humans allows for such a possibility to take place, and that it did so in Europe during the middle of the 20th century. Even if one accepts it is a unique event, that needn’t mean it is an unrepeatable one. Assuming a set of conditions is in place, why wouldn’t it be repeated? To stand on the side of morality isn’t good enough — it tells us more about how a person wants to be perceived rather than about what can or cannot be avoided. There may be an argument to be made that the Holocaust was payback for the death of Christ, and it is indeed offered, with one of the village Poles telling a story he claimed a friend heard. It was a place near Warsaw and the Jewish people from the town were gathered in the square, and the rabbi said to them that the Jews had condemned the innocent Christ to death and the Jews said: “Let his blood fall on our heads and on our sons’ heads." The rabbi said, “Perhaps the time has come for that, so let us do nothing, let us go, let us do as we’re asked.” 

      Writing on the film, Shoshana Felman notes that such a claim allows the local Poles and others “a facile and exhaustive compatibility with knowledge” (‘In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah’) and this is what Shoah obviously resists. It is resisted for example by historian Raul Hilberg a little earlier in the film. He makes clear the Nazis “invented very little, and they did not invent the portrait of the Jew, which also was taken over lock, stock and barrel from writing going back to the sixteenth century.” The persecution of and the propagandising of the Jew wasn’t novel; what happened to be was the “final solution”. Hilberg reckons there were three stages to this development: the first was around the 4th to 6th century missionaries proposed the Jews couldn’t live amongst the Christians as Jews, then in the Middle Ages that the Jews couldn’t live among Christians, and then the Nazis who decreed: “You may not live.” But even if this historical progression is correct, as Hilberg gives nuance to the blanket claim of inevitable persecution reputedly proposed by the rabbi, then this still needed bureaucratic logic to be carried out successfully. For the Jewish people to no longer live, it would require a system of inference and effectiveness. As Hilbert says, “…the very wording ‘final solution’ or ‘total solution’ or territorial solution’ leaves something to the bureaucrat that he must infer.”  

    This is an important point if we want to insist that Lanzmann’s film isn’t playing a blame game, saying that the Christians have never forgiven the Jewish people for the death of Christ, and in turn that Jews must forever be wary of Christians who, given half a chance, would seek vengeance all over again. The rabbi’s claim can never be more than an aspect of anti-semitism, and one that, if taken too seriously, will turn the chosen people into an inevitably persecuted one. Rather than the rough binary Kael proposes between the Gentiles and the Jews, with Lanzmann’s purpose to show how easy it is for the former to persecute the latter, and how the film is a constant warning about this danger, instead, the film offers permeating guilt rather than binary guilt. In binary guilt, we have the guilty and the innocent; in permeating guilt we have degrees of culpability, which isn’t at all the same thing as a knee-jerk relativising that abdicates the Germans from moral responsibility. Part of the horror involved in the camps was how broadly culpability could be spread, so that the closer one would get to innocence rested on how closely and quickly one would find oneself in the gas chambers. Yet even here, there was literally a race to the top, the attempted survival of the fittest. As Muller says, “it was dark, no one could see, so the strongest people tried to climb higher. Because they probably realised the higher they got, the more air there was. They could breathe better….Which is why children and weaker people, and the aged, wound up at the bottom.” 

       If there was competition even for the resource of air once in the chamber, then there were constant fights inevitably over resources within the camp, and a hierarchy amongst those who managed to survive. Kapos had a privileged place as they headed work units and could dole out privileges and violence, while the Sonderkommandos were responsible for dealing with those entering the gas chambers, whose bodies would be burnt afterwards. This suggests a dog-eat-dog world, but this would only be half-true: it was also one in which the dogs were regularly beaten. As Primo Levi says, speaking of his time in Auschwitz: “…punches and slaps passed among us as daily language and we soon learned to distinguish meaningful blows from the others inflicted out of savagery, to create pain and humiliation…which is equivalent to saying that our manner of living was not very different from that of donkey and dogs.” (Moments of Reprieve). These blows weren’t always from Nazi guards, but often from other camp inmates. After all, as Levi details, many criminals were offered the chance to move from a regular prison to a concentration camp, where they would have better rations and more power: “a lot of them boasted that they lived better in the camp than at home, because, in addition to the heady pleasure of command, they were given a free hand with the rations allotted to us.” (Moments of Reprieve) 

       There is nothing in Lanzmann’s film or Levi’s work that does anything to undermine the enormity of the Holocaust, but both Lanzmann and Levi do insist on recognising the nuances involved in the terror. Shoah seems determined to undermine the idea of a top-down, good-bad world that allows easy differentiation from awful Nazis and saintly Jews. We might scoff at Suchomel’s special pleading, but the viewer can do worse than put oneself in his shoes, however morally paradoxical such a claim may be, if for no better reason than the relative miseries he suffered are much closer to most viewers’ worst experiences than the astonishing maltreatment of the victims. When Suchomel speaks about the smell and the heat and how tough it was for him to work in Treblinka, we may dismiss his hard-luck story, seeing ourselves on the side of those who suffered far greater woes than these. But, whether we like it or not, for most watching the film, such woes are closer to our sensorial and phenomenological reality than what happened to those who died. This isn’t only and most obviously because death is ‘another matter’, with only around 65 recorded cases of people coming back from the dead between 1982 and 2018, according to The Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine. Very few can thus readily identify with dying. But many can without difficulty imagine or remember a terrible smell or pounding heat. The risk of dismissing too quickly these affects because they are being felt by a German working in the camps, all the better so we can sympathise with those who suffered far more within them, is that a shared feeling gives way to a moral feeling. The viewer sides with the victim without comprehending the degrees of misery within the camps that would incorporate almost everybody in them. 

      The moral paradox we propose is there to acknowledge a sensorial and phenomenological world that can’t be distinguished between the good and the bad. The latter are moral categories not sensual ones, and the danger of them is that they don’t concern themselves with compassion at all but with taking an abstract position. It goes without saying that the viewer should side with those who suffered the greatest of atrocities over those who underwent modest inconveniences, yet one way of moving towards the former is to understand a little of the latter too. It might sound a paradox too far to propose that full empathy demands one show sympathy towards the guards as well as the inmates, but this is surely what full empathy would have to mean. 

   We would have to offer it as well to a woman, Mrs Michelsohn, who was the wife of a Nazi schoolteacher in Chelmno. They arrive and when Lanzmann asks her about those first impressions at the village she says “the sanitary facilities were disastrous. The only toilet was in Warthrbucken, in the town hall, you had to go there.”   This isn’t much of a problem next to what was happening to the Jewish people nearby, but finding a functional toilet is a fact many more can identify with over the camp’s atrocities. One way of looking at Shoah isn’t to see it simply as an enumeration of anguish (which ofcourse in many ways it is) but also as an incremental attempt to get us to comprehend and find compassion towards the immediately unimaginable. Lanzmann may have little sympathy of his own for this woman who confuses Jews with Poles, and she doesn’t seem to care to remember the number who died — “four something, four hundred thousand, forty thousand.” But it is useful to understand the privations of those who were in a position in every way so much better than even the most fortunate of Jews, and yet who themselves could see they were unfortunate next to many other Germans. To dismiss too easily their self-pity is to risk foregoing our own privilege. We end up suffering with the Jews all the better to judge people we regard as our inferiors: “the lowlifes’ to use Kael’s generic language. 

     If Shoah is the great film many regard it to be, we shouldn’t find ourselves falling into moral superiority. We must surely instead accept our roles as moral bystanders. Better to understand the inadequacy of our understanding of our comprehensive moral positioning. When Michelsohn replies after Lanzmann says the number exterminated was four hundred thousand, she repeats the number, knew it had a four in it and says “sad, sad, sad!” The temptation is to laugh at either her ignorance or duplicity, but to respond in such a manner is like viewing any number of Nazi films where our purpose is to watch with retrospective comfort rather than permeating discomfort. If Lanzmann has made a film that collapses time and space, then to offer the laugh of knowing hindsight would seem a dereliction of aesthetic duty. This doesn’t mean that Lanzmann is himself incapable of irony and superiority, but that seems a failing in the film rather than a merit. If we are right that Shoah wants to interrogate the past as if it still has one foot remaining in it, then ironic moments can throw us back into our present over remaining in the hell that is the Holocaust. Plenty Nazi/Holocaust films offer hindsight, whether through irony, superiority or too-easy sensitivity, from The Truce to The Pianist, Fateless to Inglourious Basterds, but Shoah more than most avoids this ease. When Michelsohn says it was “sad, sad, sad!”, it echoes an earlier remark where she says “it was terrible, a sad sight.” But more importantly, she says the villagers wanted nothing to do with all that. “Gets on your nerves, seeing that every day…”  Michelsohn no doubt wishes to present herself as a decent human who wasn’t involved in such horrors, but there were only ten or eleven German families in this Polish village, and why were they there if not to further the Nazi cause? Yet rather than condemning a woman who may well deserve our condemnation, better to see her as a product of history and of the inadequacy of language. It seems she wanted to get on and make something of her life, and this coincided with history and an inevitable implication. Whether the language she uses to describe the Jewish suffering is sincere, it is without doubt inadequate. But what language would be adequate to the task? 

      In a rarely quoted essay, George Orwell notes that as “…soon as we are dealing with anything that is not concrete or visible (and even there to a great extent — look at the difficulty of describing anyone's appearance) we find that words are no like to the reality than chessmen to living beings” (New Words) Language becomes a general agreement rather than a specific contract, and idioms and cliches often pass for communication. When Michelsohn says things are sad or terrible, one may wish to condemn her for meagre language given the magnitude of what was happening around her, but this is where what counts is more the detail than the sentiment. “The Jews came in trucks, and later there was a narrow-gauge railway. The screams!…” she says. “Day after day, the same spectacle!” Screams of terror! Because they knew what was happening to them.” Hilberg says “in all of my works I have never begun by asking the big questions. Because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers, and I have preferred to address these things which are minutiae or details in order that I might then be able to put together in a gestalt a picture which, if not an explanation, is at least a description, a more full description, of what transpired.” This needn’t in Lanzmann’s case negate affect, but it suggests he must be careful about moving us too quickly towards it. Morality can tell us what to feel, but doesn’t help much in making us feel anything but the most rudimentary emotions. The difference between that most harrowing line, “if you could lick my heart it would poison you”, and it is “sad, sad, sad” is enormous. The difference proves however, that, contrary to Orwell and Hilberg, in this instance, is that the fighter manages to convey without concreteness his experience, and discovers it in the most harrowing of metaphors. 

    If the film is a work of art it rests on the balance between the specificity of detail and the aesthetic form. Kent Jones is right to say that “discussions of what we do not see in the film avoid a proper acknowledgement of the richness of what we do see, and hear. Its running time is neither a taunt nor a stunt, and is a punishment only for those who think of time as something to be ‘invested’—rather, it is integral to the force of the film, in the sense that the time span attunes us to the repeated visual and thematic motif of approaching, coming closer to places, to mental pictures of existence in Chelmno, Auschwitz, and Treblinka…” (Criterion) In the film's third section, Hilberg and Lanzmann are looking over train times. What could seem the most mundane of facts contains within them the most significant of particularities. In the common Holocaust imagination, trains travelled from one place to another, from a town hundreds or thousands of miles away, eventually reaching their destination at the camp, with people thirsty, hungry and exhausted. Yet this is to generalise from many particulars, and we see, for example, one timetable showing a train that took about twenty hours from its original destination, Sedziszow, to Treblinka. This is only a distance of 350 km, and those who arrived at the stop preceding the final one would have been on the train for three hours, as opposed to twenty. It shows that the distances travelled contrasted sharply between one person and another. But what the timetable also shows is that the train must have been impossibly slow, even accounting for the various places it stopped at along the way, sometimes for almost an hour. It was going at such a pace chiefly due to the weight: the train was carrying fifty trucks. This wasn’t any old cargo; it was made up of thousands of Jews going to meet their death. Yet looking at the report “it’s just very regular traffic” Hilberg says. “Death traffic”, Lanzmann adds. Hilberg concurs. Hilberg then notes that the train arrived at 11:24 in the morning and left again at 15:59. “In that interval of time”, Hilberg says, “the train has to be unloaded, clean and turned around.” Hilberg makes clear that this is industrialisation in action, but applied instead of to goods to people and, instead of items transferred from one place to another for use, going from a to b as the human equivalent of scrap metal. While only a number were useful alive, most of them were of use dead. Bomba would cut the hair of those destined so soon afterwards for the chambers, and “the hair obtained in this manner was next disinfected, dried, packed in sacks and sold to German companies as raw material for haircloth and felt.” (Auschwitz.org) 

     Yet Shoah isn’t a factual documentary; it seeks a far greater revelation than that, and wants the facts contained by a form that can create the space for meditative feeling. Hilberg’s analysis is preceded by us watching a train in the present (carrying coal) arriving at Treblinka, and followed by a panning shot of the countryside, with the sound of cows in the distance, before arriving at a train crossing. Lanzmann cuts to a medium-long shot as we see cows crossing the tracks, andHilberg’s voice comes in again. Lanzmann holds the shot for a few seconds before cutting back to Hilberg. From a certain perspective, these shots can be deemed pointless: if facts were what we were after, then better surely a bit of archival footage or photos showing us people from the ghettoes getting on trains. But that would keep us in the factual, while Lanzmann wants us to move from one to the other: offering facts that can release feeling without insisting on the sentimental. While the Steven Spielberg-produced talking-heads documentary Last Days offers the factual within the veil of the icky and the historical (plucked strings on the soundtrack all the better to pluck at our cardio threads), Shoah wants the factual to produce meditative as opposed to sentimental feeling. In the sentimental lies the likelihood of Mrs Michelsohn’s response that things are sad, sad, sad. In meditative feeling rests the space required to recognise the content of fact as the burgeoning of feeling. From such an angle, Shoah can seem too quick a film rather than too slow. We might wish for still more time to absorb the information Hilberg offers us, as we think about that train journey which took twenty hours for those who got on at Sedziszow, and who may have been wondering each time it stopped whether this was their destination — whether this was where they might at last get some water or something to eat. 

              There are many moments in the film that generate within the viewer the imaginative empathy that asks us to reach into the impossibility of events so far removed from almost any human being’s life. As camp survivor Charlotte Delbo proposed — Jewish people “expected the worst - not the unthinkable.” (Auschwitz.org)  If those in the camps could hardly imagine what was happening to them, what chance does a viewer have of understanding from so distant a place as a viewing experience? While a documentary like Last Days plonks the Holocaust into our lap, Shoah remains fundamentally aloof, as though not only 9 hrs but even the 350 hours Lanzmann shot wouldn’t even get us close to understanding what happened. What he can do, however, is create around the information he offers the spaces that allow us to reflect on what these facts can begin to mean. Hilberg is right to say that he works from the small details, yet Lanzmann can still create out of them emotional extrapolation. 

             If Shoah is a work of art, it rests partly on imagining the unimaginable and finding a form within which to contain it, one that at the same time will make clear our imaginations are demanded and equally insufficient. This is a paradox most films on the camps refuse to entertain, or insist on entertaining in their refusal to confront the insufficiency. BothSchindler’s List and Last Days, for example, use many aspects of entertainment to convey the experience: the non-diegetic music, the reaction shots, suspense devices and so on. Speaking of representing the Holocaust, Jacques Ranciere mentions Robert Antelme’s writing on the camps and says, “Antelme’s experience is not ‘unrepresentable’ in the sense that the language for conveying it does not exist. The language exists, and the syntax exists. Not as an exceptional language and syntax, but, on the contrary, as a mode of expression peculiar to the aesthetic regime in the arts in general.” (The Future of the Image) However, Ranciere also says, speaking of Shoah, “Nothing is unrepresentable as a property of the event. There are simply choices.” There have been in film since the war numerous accounts of the Holocaust and we can list a handful (fictional and non-fictional)— Night and Fog, Kapo, The Passenger, The Night Porter, Seven Beauties, Schindler’s List, The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas, Fateless, Last Days, Zone of Interest, Son of Saul, KZ. But there is a difference between simple choices and simplistic ones, between finding a form that contains a problem, and assuming that the film has to use the conventional all the better to make us understand the magnitude of event. One needn’t claim that this is the difference between the tasteful and the tasteless; often the distasteful comes out of the tasteful as we find that the tactless rests on misconceived choices.  

    The most famously explored example of this is probably Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapo. There have been far worse films on the camps, including tasteful ones, and if Pontecorvo arrives at the distasteful it might be because he has arrived at the tactless. Jacques Rivette (whose regular cinematographer William Lubtchansky shot many hours of Shoah) made much of a tracking shot in the film. Rivette noted: “look however in Kapo, the shot where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing – this man is worthy of the most profound contempt.” (Cahiers Du Cinema) We can spend a bit more time on this shot in a film made by a filmmaker who would go on to make two important films of the 1960s: The Battle of Algiers and Burn, and in a style not so very different from his work in Kapo. In this Holocaust film, he shows the previously saintly Emmanuelle Riva’s complete disillusionment as she decides to take her life. There are four shots from the moment Riva steps out of the hut to her against the electrocuted fence.  In the first, the camera follows her closely as she starts to move towards it, a second as the film cuts from behind the fence showing her coming forward, a third a close-up of Riva electrocuted, and a fourth again from behind the fence as the camera tracks in on her with her body against the wire. It isn’t only the tracking shot in Kapo that is the problem — all four shots show an impoverished sensibility, yet one that seems adequate when covering the Algerian War of Independence and slave revolts in the Caribbean.  Does this mean that these latter events are less significant than the Holocaust and somehow more capable of a pulpier expression? 

    If so, it indicates that the Holocaust is aesthetically exceptional, a claim which doesn’t have its problems, and one that seems contrary to Ranciere’s. The Holocaust is nevertheless, representationally, very difficult to film, and to help us explain why, we can go very lateral indeed by looking at Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, written thirty years before the camps and covering exploitative employment in pre-WWI Britain. The narrator proposes that these apparently free men working casual hours as labourers and with no security in terribly cold conditions would have been better off as slaves. The person employing them didn’t care if they became ill or died, “but if they had been [the boss] Ruston’s property, such work as this would have been deferred until it could be done without danger to the health and lives of the slaves; or at any rate, even if it proceeded during such weather, their owner would have seen to it that they were properly clothed and fed…” We can imagine without difficulty a director filming this scene of workers in the cold and wearing inadequate clothing, just as we can also see a director shooting scenes with slaves on a plantation working long hours in stifling heat. The scenes would be horrible to watch and possibly uncomfortable to film, but not unimaginably or unrepresentatively so. Yet, how to film numerous aspects of the camps? How do you film inside the gas chambers as Muller describes them, with people clambering on top of each other in the dark trying to get air? How to film a line-up of people shivering in the morning cold in rags, defecating with what Suchomel calls death anxiety, while all so thin that only advanced anorexics need apply as extras? How to film people lifting out bodies from a mass grave and finding the victims’ skin coming off in your hands? These are all images Lanzmann conjures up for us and brilliantly exemplify the question of the written sign over the filmic image. They remain in the realm of the signifier and the signified and don’t quite become the cinematic sign. In other words, the signifier is offered as a moment that the speaker expresses in language and that the viewer receives as abstract meaning they match to the best of their ability or imaginative empathy, giving concreteness to the words they hear. Usually, of course, cinema doesn’t work chiefly with signifiers and signifieds but with signs — with images that we see rather than those we imagine. 

     This suggests that while we should be wary of seeing the Holocaust as exceptional, we can’t pretend that showing on screen certain images of the camps isn't fraught with difficulties. The film can ameliorate the apparent misery by showing well-fed extras, or insist on conveying the horrors by casting people suffering horrors of their own in the midst of their eating disorder. It is no accident that films on the Holocaust have on several occasions found themselves trying to convey the experience with varying degrees of abstraction — including, as we have noted, Son of Saul and Zone of Interest. This seems to be what Pontecorvo hasn’t done in this scene from Kapo. It isn’t enough that he shows Riva (so well known only the year before in Alain Resnais’s provocative and representationally complex Hiroshima, mon amour — itself made four years after his documentary on the camps, Night and Fog) running towards the fence. But he then reverses the angle, filmically anticipating her self-electrocution. It gives to the moment the potential relish often found in the anticipatory horror film — where we wait for a character’s demise. Pontecorvo then cuts to the close-up, as if switching from horror movie trope to Dreyer-esque martyrdom (a la The Passion of Joan of Arc), before concluding on that tracking shot Rivette found so contemptible. 

      Pontecorvo is far from an inept filmmaker but, if Ranciere insists the Holocaust isn’t unrepresentable, he’d be inclined to agree that not all subjects are equally representable in the same way. We needn’t insist exceptional status for the camps, but we can see that Pontecorvo falls into the hopelessly vulgar and that Lanzmann’s approach to the subject avoids such lapses of sensibility. It is a question of tone, and someone may choose to bring out the vulgarity and absurdity without falling into the tactless. When in Seven Beauties Lina Wertmuller shows Fernando Rey’s character saying he has had enough, he throws himself into the shit, drowning in the excrement of his fellow victims. It is a semi-humorous and unequivocally vulgar image, but oddly less so than fellow Italian filmmaker Pontecorvo’s more tasteful (and thus, given the context, distasteful) illustration of suicide. 

         If we think so highly of Shoah, it isn’t because of its discretion, its refusal to show the Holocaust as a representational reality during the early 1940s. It shouldn’t be used as a necessary way to make sense of the camps filmically; only thus far the most eloquent one. It understands that even if cinema is a sign language, if you like, rather than a signifer/signified system, it nevertheless contains within it the capacity for refusing the explicitness of the sign. It is a vital element to offscreen space: with a death depicted beyond the frame as no more than the sound of a gun being fired, or of a kiss that becomes a sex scene we need never witness as the camera pans away from the bed. Classic Hollywood often practised examples of both, and usually as a consequence of censorship so deep that it became part of film’s very form. Yet it can also be used by filmmakers attending to the possibilities in the form. It might be the reverse track down the stairs in Frenzy, as we become aware that a woman who enters an apartment with the killer will be murdered but we won’t be witnessing it. No director more than Robert Bresson made use of the unseen, whether practically to limit the perspective to the prisoner in his cell in A Man Escaped, or to present events elliptically, like a fight in L’argent. He allows a version of the signifier/signified relationship as the viewer has the sound but not the image, and must imagine the objects invoked. 

     We can return to Kapo now and believe that Pontecorvo needn’t have used four shots and tactlessly showed Riva frying on the fence, but tactfully, even better tactically, showed her starting her run, leaving the frame and, while the film holds to an empty shot, we hear the sound of human flesh colliding with electrified barbed wire. One shot would have sufficed, and even a cut to her dead against the wire might have been more than necessary. By proposing the tactical, as readily as the tactful, one acknowledges that different approaches are pertinent to the given subject. Pontecorvo may sometimes seem tactless and crude in his other work, but they are tactically much more successful, conveying the tension in struggles for self-emancipation. His approach in Kapo might have worked if Pontecorvo were making a film, for example, on the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. But it appears crude in the context of the camps — perhaps partly because it gives such agency to the camera and so little agency to the characters. 

           In Shoah, Lanzmann successfully conveys a feeling of entrapment, even though the film was shot in the late 70s and everyone he speaks to had their lives back. Yet while they are free to live in the various locations where he finds them or films them: Israel, the US, Canada, Corfu, Lanzmann is chiefly interested in what is going on inside their heads and what is mainly going on in there are atrocities that they conjure up in such vivid detail that it’s as if they have never gone away — Muller and Vrba, for example, had already written accounts of their experiences. Shoah offers a cranial claustrophobic catastrophe (Shoah means catastrophe in Hebrew) within the tranquil and brings out all the better, not just the terrible experiences Vrba, Muller, Bomba and others underwent, but the potential loneliness that would have been twofold. This is the terrible solitude of knowing millions of fellow Jews had been killed, including members of one’s own family, and also the isolation of knowing that your experiences are so extreme, so singular, that they couldn’t be casually shared. When Zuckermann says licking his heart would poison someone, or his colleague Simha Rottem muses in the film’s final lines whether he was the last Jew as he toured the Warsaw ghetto, we see just how penetratingly the film has drilled into a generational, ethnic solitude.  

     Rottem’s claim offers a devastating moment, though it is unlikely to be a tearful one. He doesn’t express it with lachrymose distress as Abraham Bomba, Filip Muller and Jan Karski do. Rottem’s comment captures the horror of a failed achievement, an attempt at a Final Solution that didn’t achieve its goal, but was six million lives towards success. Yet this is unlikely to move us in the same way as Muller and Bomba’s testimonies or Jan Karski’s, even if the tears provoked won’t quite be elicited in the viewer in each instance in the same way. Bomba and Muller are in the middle of their testimonies and they find themselves describing a detail that moves them in the telling: Bomba explains how a fellow barber saw his wife and her sister, and her sister’s husband, coming to him to have their hair cut before going into the chamber. The barber couldn’t tell them this was the last time he would see them alive — Nazis were standing behind him. All he could do was spend a moment longer on their hair than the others to express something of his love. Bomba speaks in broken English, and some of the details are a bit unclear, but the impossible loss of loved ones, and one’s inability to hold them at length and tell them what awaits them is unequivocal.

    In Muller’s testimony, he saw fellow Czechs singing in defiance before being gassed, and, as he speaks of it, he breaks down. Facts become feelings while important details of the camps that he has been offering are dissolved into pure, momentary affectivity. The viewer will likely join him in tears while Muller didn’t quite join his Czech compatriots in the chamber. He tried but they told him if he dies, who is there to tell others of their experiences? He must survive. The Czechs accept their death but will not accept Muller joining them and, in turn, Muller survives and conveys to us an experience with tears that become our own.

       Karski’s tears may be different for two reasons. Firstly, he isn’t speaking of his own terrible experiences. Secondly, he breaks down at the very beginning of his interview with Lanzmann — not in the middle of his testimony. It is potentially the ‘weakest’ of the three moments: he is the least emotionally involved since he served as Envoy for the Polish government in exile. He was not sent to the camps, and we have no context yet for the emotion he is already expressing. He may have been imprisoned in Auschwitz in 1940 and tortured by the Gestapo, but we have no knowledge of his personal suffering within the context of the film. It is his role as witness to that of others Lanzmann focuses upon. However, if we acknowledge that all three moments are tears of empathy rather than personal sorrow, it make sense that, even if Karski didn’t suffer quite as directly or as terribly as Bomba and Muller, his breakdown is no less impactful than theirs. It is also the case that, by the time of Karski’s appearance halfway through the second part, we have probably become so overwhelmed by the desperate stories the film has explored that it is almost as if Karski is well aware of the film we have been watching. This is nonsense from one point of view but a valid response from another. Lanzmann would have filmed all the interviews within a given time period (around two years) and then with his editor, Ziva Postec, put the footage together before the film’s premiere in April, 1985. Karski would presumably have had no more access to the footage than anyone else. But within the context of the film we are watching, Karski’s tears can seem like the tears of the accumulated misery we have seen, while of course a reflection of the misery he did see, and the regret he no doubt feels, wishing he could have done more. 

     Karski ventured into the ghettos as Envoy, hoping that, by reporting to the Polish government on what he had directly witnessed, this would shake everyone up — they would have to recognise the Jewish people were being systematically murdered. One of the Jewish leaders said, “I know the Western world. You are going to deal with the English. Now you will give them your oral reports. I am sure it will strengthen your report if you will be able to say, ‘I saw it myself’”, and so a visit was organised. “It was not a world. There was not humanity…begging each other. Crying and hungry.” When the Germans in uniform walked past: “…Silence! Everybody frozen until he passed. No movement, no begging, nothing. German…contempt. This is apparent they are subhuman. They are not human.” Karksi goes back again the next day. “…I was more conditioned, so I felt other things, stench, nervousness, tension. Bedlam.” The person showing him all this says to Karski: “they are dying, that’s all. They are dying…but remember, remember.” There Karski was trying to hold all that he had seen in memory so that he could better report it to the West, and there in the interview thirty-five years later he is living in the West (in the US), being interviewed, and caught between the desire to remember again and the determination to forget. “Now…I go back thirty-five years. No, I don’t go back…” he says as he can’t hold back the feeling, gets up and leaves the room. The camera holds for a moment on the chair and Karski shortly after returns. “I come back. I am ready.”  He then explains his role and what he saw. 

         We can assume Lanzmann didn’t expect to make his film with the guaranteed tears that are manipulatively present in melodrama, with anyone involved in producing Stella Dallas and Imitation of Life well aware that they needed to offer scenes that would elicit the strongest of expressed emotion. It doesn’t make the films any the worse for doing so, and are perhaps all the better for the presence of the lachrymose. They are still offering, if you like, honest tears, even if they are engineered ones. Some might say they are acceptably manipulated because the films are fictional accounts and not factual documentaries. But it wouldn’t take long for someone to come up with plenty of examples of manipulated tears in documentary form, and we ourselves could give Last Days as an example, with its reaction shots and non-diegetic music. Sure, the people recalling their memories are real. However, the devices used to get the audience to understand the atrocities might be defined as dishonest tears if we sense the device is stronger than the content: that the experiences of the survivors in Last Days is overly contained by the tools required to express them. Archival footage, non-diegetic music, symbolic cuts back to three lit candles placed on the walls at one of the camps, all there to make sure we feel something, which we might have hoped would have been possible by the testimonies alone. 

      In this sense, Lanzmann risks having no tears at all because he doesn’t use any of the tools usually required to extract them. He may in the first hour of the film ask the other Chelmno survivor why he is smiling, with Michael Podchlebnik wondering what Lanzmann would expect him to do? “Sometimes you smile, sometimes you cry.” Those tears do come not long afterwards when he explains how he realised he was putting his murdered wife into the grave. He wanted to join her, but the Germans said no, that he would survive — he was strong enough to work. When Lanzmann asks him initiallywhy he is smiling, this isn’t because Lanzmann expects tears, but is presumably as amazed as we are at the warmth and generosity to be found in this open face that has seen so many terrible things. When he describes just how terrible, he cries and the viewer may well find themselves doing likewise. Stanley Gordon West might famously and fatuously have claimed, “smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone’, but not in Shoah. We might find the smile as inexplicable as Lanzmann does, and discover in the explicable tears that Podchlebnik offers that he will have to smile alone but that we will share, however inadequately, in his terrible melancholy. 

        When speaking of his documentary work, in a passage quoted by Slavoj Zizek in the wonderfully titled The Fright of Real Tears, Krzysztof Kieslowski says, “I managed to photograph some real tears several times. It’s something completely different [from fictional tears]. I’m frightened of real tears. In fact, I don’t even know whether I’ve got the right to photograph them.” If Kieslowski is correct, then what right does Lanzmann have to photograph them within the context of so traumatising an event of the Holocaust? From a certain perspective, these can seem the most obscene tears ever shown on film, but from another, they are the most Real, if we move from lower case to the upper case and invoke Zizek more broadly. Zizek reckons if “when we film ‘real life’ scenes in a documentary way, we get people playing themselves (or, if not this, then obscenity, the pornographic impasse into intimacy), the only way to depict people beneath their protective mask of playing is, paradoxically, to make them directly play a role — to move into fiction.” Zizek’s parenthesis can be seen as too hasty; there is an either/or between playing a role or revealing too much, and better to have that revelation within the context of a fictional character which will be played properly and will avoid the obscene. However, such a claim would propose the Holocaust is better represented as fiction over fact; rather than the documentary presence of Muller, Bomba and Srebnik, we would have actors performing the roles as depictive fiction over recalled event. Yet while we can understand why Zizek makes such a claim over Kieslowski’s shift from documentary to fiction features, who would have preferred Lanzmann had made Shoah as a drama, and not least for some of the reasons we have already explored? 

      It is as though the obscenity Zizek sees as the real tears Kieslowski took flight from, as the director realised it would be as terrible to enter the bedroom of people making love as it would be tolerable in a fiction film, contains its own obscenity in reverse. Wouldn’t it be obscene to go into the gas chambers in a fiction film just as it would be to do so in a documentary? Some will no doubt claim that to enter the bedroom in fiction is a problem too, and of course for many years Hollywood cinema refused the intimacy that the frequent kisses in the films proposed. But this was a question of prudishness versus prurience; of how far a filmmaker ought to go to conserve people’s privacy or to liberate them from their conservatism. A filmmaker showing emaciated extras climbing over each other to access the remaining air would seem for many a fictional obscenity, just as we can understand however troublesome the claim that had Lanzmann come across footage “by an SS officer showing the deaths of 3,000 people in a gas chamber, not only would I not have included it in my film, I would have destroyed it.” (The Patagonian Hare) Yet this is an odd remark to make by someone who has opened the same book by talking about Al-Qaeda and ISIS execution films. “Why have we not been allowed to see the appalling images of hostages put to death under Islamic law in Iraq or in Afghanistan? Pathetic amateur videos shot by the killers themselves, which aim to terrorise and succeed.” (The Patagonian Hare) Lanzmann doesn’t seek to destroy them: he watches them, and describes them in immense detail. Why should a film of the gas chamber be destroyed and videos by terrorists broadcast? That is a difficult question Lanzmann chooses not to answer and finds himself in a contradiction he doesn’t feel obliged to confront, as 450 pages separate the two statements. Yet the problem remains, and Lanzmann may have been wise to avoid trying to answer it. 

      Another conundrum he addresses and then ignores in his autobiography is exceptionalism versus conflationism, between the Holocaust as a unique event and the Shoah as just another atrocious act amongst many. Various thinkers have addressed this question, with Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin, for example, quoting the German philosopher Eberhard Jackel, saying the Holocaust was “a historical singularity”, suggesting scholars cannot use the usual tools to explain the event. “It may even require higher standards of scholarship. There is a difference between claiming that uniqueness cannot be explained and requiring an explanation for uniqueness.” (‘The Uniqueness of the Holocaust’) The important point that Margalit and Motzkin make isn’t that the Jews are unique, but the Germans carrying out the atrocities were; that it wasn’t enough they humiliated the Jews, and it wasn’t enough that they exterminated them. It also wasn’t enough that they humiliated them, they had to do it at a distance lest they appear contaminated by a people they wanted to eradicate. And how would this be done? Mainly by industrial means, by using the language of the market and trade to incorporate the human. No metaphors were required: it was as if the figurative and the literal collapsed, with the Jewish people not treated as cattle; they were cattle. Lanzmann quotes a Gilles Deleuze remark the philosopher made when they were youthful friends: “where there is trade in things there is trade in humans.” (The Patagonian Hare) The risk of saying the Holocaust is unique risks exceptionalism; that it wasn’t is to flirt with conflationism and false equivalence. What Maraglit and Motzkin make clear is that the Jews aren’t an exceptional people; the Germans doing the deeds were, and that is what must be avoided. We need to protect ourselves from such atrocities, not protect first and foremost those who suffered from them. 

   However, what is also important in Maraglit and Motzkin's claims is this idea of a higher standard of scholarship and we might wish to apply it to a higher standard of aesthetics. This can seem troublesome — are some events so special that the normal rules of representation no longer apply? Not quite, but we have established how a situation is filmed is not without relevance, as Rivette proposed, and whether an event can be represented is a question worth asking. If a viewer feels an action sequence where twenty German soldiers are machine-gunned down by a firing squad is no different from showing Jews pushed into the gas chambers and suffering under the absence of air, then all images are equal and the nuance of our responses flattened. There may be filmmakers who have pursued this flattening effect (and perhaps Tarantino is one of them in Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained), but the point of aesthetics lies in the differentiation. By drawing analogies between historians seeking a higher standard of scholarship, with filmmakers requiring a more nuanced approach to representation, we can insist the Holocaust isn’t unique — but its depiction must be singular. 

       This leads us to return to the Real and to conclude on the tears that we have found so important to this film far removed from the tear-jerker. Zizek has used the word Unhintergehbar, often translated as the unsurpassable or the irreducible, which has similarities with Lacan’s notion of the Real that is central to much of the Slovenian philosopher’s work. Zizek has discussed in conversation that, in Michel Foucault’s oeuvre, one cannot think outside what Foucault calls the episteme — for example, the epoch in which we are living and “the horizon of knowledge through which we observe reality and interact with it.” (‘How Philosophy Got Lost’) One could very nearly argue that the Holocaust is beyond our comprehension, the event of all events that is the closest to the unsurpassable or the irreducible. When Zizek says “the Real is in itself a hole, a gap, an opening in the middle of the symbolical order — it is the lack around which the symbolical order is structured” (The Sublime Object of Ideology), one could potentially claim the death camps, and all the machinations around them that Shoah explores, can be comprehended incrementally but that defeats us in its totality. Thinking of Foucault’s epistemai and how Zizek summarises Lacan’s the Real, then we constantly come up against horizons of comprehensibility which keeps getting swallowed up by the Real that we cannot quite apprehend. In the Kieslowski book, Zizek speaks of Shoah in a footnote. He wonders if Lanzmann’s film is, “in a way, made not to be seen: its prohibitive length guarantees that most of the spectators  (including those who praise it) did not and will not ever see it in its entirety, so that they will forever feel guilty for it, and this guilt for not seeing it all clearly serves as the equivalent of our guilt at not being able to see the entire horror of the Holocaust.” (The Fright of Real Tears) Zizek is an often brilliant thinker, but this claim has more than a few problems. Which people does he mean (or just himself), and Shoah is surely far removed from the almost impassive unwatchability of a film like Andy Warhol’s Empire — a film of a similar length made up of a blank stare at the Empire State Building.      

      Zizek thus couches Shoah as unwatchable, and out of this unwatchability comes the guilt we cannot face in confronting the Holocaust. Our take is very different: Shoah is compelling though harrowing, hard to watch but far from unwatchable. Yet somehow watching it isn’t enough; this might be close to the dutifulness that would alleviate the guilt Zizek proposes in us not watching it. But what matters is the fright of real tears, certainly those of Bomba, Muller, Podchlebnik and Karski, but also those of the viewer, whose tears can seem still more honest than many an engineered response in even the best melodramas. It is as though Lanzmann doesn’t take us to those melodramatic places that makeus weep, a sorrowful place Linda Williams looks at through Franco Moretti, who “has argued that literature that makes us cry operates via a special manipulation of temporality: We cry, Moretti argues, not just because the characters do, but at the precise moment when desire is finally recognized as futile. The release of tension produces tears, which become a kind of homage to a happiness that is kissed goodbye.” (‘Film Bodies/Gender, Genre and Excess’) This happiness kissed goodbye that we find in films where characters haven’t loved enough, have missed opportunities or have been unfair to loved ones, has produced numerous great films, and in some of them, the tears have been honest in their way. But nobody could say of the events Shoah depicts and the lives laid ruin that they are sad. This is the melodramatic word Mrs Michelsohn repeats three times, of course, as if one won’t be enough to cover the tragedy, but where three doesn’t come close to the understanding required. Sadness needs a hankie, tragedy on this scale demands an ocean. To cry me a river seems like litotes. It is partly out of this realisation that Lanzmann’s comprehension comes, seeing in his refusals, retreats, his interrogations and peregrinations, a form that fits the devastation he is trying to excavate. Many a film on the Holocaust fails to find its form, adopting other genres and aspects of established narrative to try to tell the story of the camps. However, maybe it isn’t a story at all, but a nexus of incomprehensibility held together by a pernicious ideology intermingling with a 2000-year-old antisemitism. How to film that? Lanzmann doesn’t quite try, yet what he does manage to do is take the idea that, if you lick a survivor’s heart it might poison you, yet it might also take you as close as you will ever come to finding tears of compassion out of an environment that made such a feeling almost impossible to access. As Srebnik (who of course doesn’t cry) says: “…I saw that as soon as anyone took a step, he fell dead. I thought that’s the way things had to be, that it was normal.” Or as Bomba puts it: “…it was very hard to feel anything, because working there day and night between dead people, between bodies, your feelings disappeared, you were dead.” 

       It is this notion of the normal as inevitably catastrophic that Shoah manages to convey, with any emotion the film extracts coming from an inhumanity that must be taken as given. To rescue anything from the rubble of such a realisation is Lanzmann’s achievement, and it remains the last word on the camps because no filmmaker, before or since, has quite managed to find the form to convey such a realisation. Night and Fog comes close, and The Passenger is a powerful fictional exploration. Son of Saul insists on staying subjectively close and The Zone of Interest sincerely aloof. But while some Holocaust films don’t even touch the sides, and some cling to the walls of the destruction, Shoah goes as close as a work probably can to the epicentre. It does not end optimistically as a train trundles on a track in the present as if containing echoes of its journeys in the past. Nevertheless, what the film offers is that those who were allowed no feelings then can find those feelings many years later as they break down in expressing them. The viewer may do likewise from a position of affective luxury, which very few films acknowledge as a luxury

© Tony McKibbin