Claude Lanzmann Quotes
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I think that no one human being would have been able to look at [a hypothetical photographic record of the Nazi gassing of Jews]... I would have preferred to destroy it. It is not visible.
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I began to understand the fundamental problem of the councils, who were required to collaborate with Germans. They had no choice - no choice at all. The role of 'collaborator' is completely false to describe them and define their attitude.
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The human brain is not prepared to understand this - even on the steps of the gas chamber.
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In a way, Steven Spielberg's film is a melodrama, a kitschy melodrama. One is affected by this story of a German swindler, nothing more than that.
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The film was a triumph everywhere. In all the newspapers. Amos Oz wrote five articles about the film. It was unanimous. I don't know how many interviews they made. They made pictures, they made profiles of me. They understood perfectly that there was 'before Shoah' and 'after Shoah'.
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...there's not a single corpse in Shoah (1985). The people who arrived at Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor were killed within two or three hours and their corpses burned. The proof is not the corpses; the proof is the absence of corpses. There were special details who gathered the dust and threw it into the wind or into the rivers. Nothing of them remained.
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I have always said that archival images are images without imagination. They petrify thought and kill any power of evocation.
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I wanted to get as close as possible to death. No personal accounts are told in Shoah (1985), no anecdotes. It's only about death.