From The New Yorker:
"One of the most important cinematic events of the year is not a movie but a book: Claude Lanzmann’s autobiography, “Le Lièvre de Patagonie” (“The Patagonian Hare”), which was published in France in February. (It’s still awaiting English translation.) The story of “Shoah,” one of the most important movies ever made, takes up about a quarter of Lanzmann’s five hundred and fifty-seven pages. It’s a startlingly revealing book that, though unsparingly personal, transcends his own experience to unfold key themes of his life that have been proven, through his films, to be universal.
The dominant theme of the book is death. Lanzmann begins with the words “La guillotine,” launching into a riff on capital punishment, his youthful fear of execution, and the freight trains in which Jews were deported to concentration camps—all on the first page.
He describes a life lived in proximity to death: dealing with violence as a member of the French Resistance while still an adolescent; constantly evading arrest as a Jew in Occupied France; reporting from the front lines during the “war of attrition” waged by Egypt against Israel after the Six-Day War; facing physical danger (from irate Germans) while making “Shoah”; conducting an audacious and law-defying love affair in North Korea in 1958; practicing extreme sports such as hang-gliding and mountain climbing; cultivating a taste for the corrida. Opening the book at random on the subway yesterday, I landed on the beginning of a chapter concerning his postwar trip to Italy with friends; it begins with the phrase “Voglio morire! Voglio morire!,” which he heard prisoners, common criminals, screaming from sealed train cars.
Lanzmann’s adult life was marked as much by love as by death—most crucially, he was with Simone de Beauvoir from 1952 to 1959. Of Beauvoir and her lifelong companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, he writes, “They helped me to think, and I gave them things to think about.” His work in movies, which began with “Pourquoi Israel,” was, in part, prompted by the desire to respond, in practice, to Sartre’s “Anti-Semite and Jew.”
"One of the most important cinematic events of the year is not a movie but a book: Claude Lanzmann’s autobiography, “Le Lièvre de Patagonie” (“The Patagonian Hare”), which was published in France in February. (It’s still awaiting English translation.) The story of “Shoah,” one of the most important movies ever made, takes up about a quarter of Lanzmann’s five hundred and fifty-seven pages. It’s a startlingly revealing book that, though unsparingly personal, transcends his own experience to unfold key themes of his life that have been proven, through his films, to be universal.
The dominant theme of the book is death. Lanzmann begins with the words “La guillotine,” launching into a riff on capital punishment, his youthful fear of execution, and the freight trains in which Jews were deported to concentration camps—all on the first page.
He describes a life lived in proximity to death: dealing with violence as a member of the French Resistance while still an adolescent; constantly evading arrest as a Jew in Occupied France; reporting from the front lines during the “war of attrition” waged by Egypt against Israel after the Six-Day War; facing physical danger (from irate Germans) while making “Shoah”; conducting an audacious and law-defying love affair in North Korea in 1958; practicing extreme sports such as hang-gliding and mountain climbing; cultivating a taste for the corrida. Opening the book at random on the subway yesterday, I landed on the beginning of a chapter concerning his postwar trip to Italy with friends; it begins with the phrase “Voglio morire! Voglio morire!,” which he heard prisoners, common criminals, screaming from sealed train cars.
Lanzmann’s adult life was marked as much by love as by death—most crucially, he was with Simone de Beauvoir from 1952 to 1959. Of Beauvoir and her lifelong companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, he writes, “They helped me to think, and I gave them things to think about.” His work in movies, which began with “Pourquoi Israel,” was, in part, prompted by the desire to respond, in practice, to Sartre’s “Anti-Semite and Jew.”
Comments