Claude Lanzmann
Shoah

If you don't stop throwing tantrums I'll call the boogeyman.

If you don't finish your homework I'll call the boogeyman.

If you don't eat your vegetables I'll call the boogeyman.

Obviously, when it was time to go to sleep, I first scoured every inch of the room, looked in the closet and under the bed to make sure the boogeyman wasn't there, ready to jump out when he was sure I had fallen asleep.

I didn't even dare imagine what he would do to punish me for tantrums, for not doing my homework, and for leaving broccoli on my plate.

I never found the boogeyman, but I always left a little light on; that way, if he caught me by surprise, I would wake up, see him, and he would scare me less.

What remained invisible always scared me more than what I could see with my own eyes.

Like in the movies, the shark terrified me until the camera showed it, and you could only sense its presence by that little tune; then when it appeared, baring its ugly snout, tearing at swimmers while they wondered where that sinister jingle came from instead of getting out of the water as fast as they could, it didn't scare me anymore; in fact, I almost rooted for him, the shark; and just to stay in Spielberg's vicinity, "Duel" scared me more than the shark precisely because the truck driver was never revealed by the camera.

Even today, it's still like that for me, let alone when I was younger and more impressionable.

Like when I saw "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann for the first time.

1995, a Roman cultural club - one of those where you couldn't enter unless you respected every detail of Comrade Folagra's code - and for love, I used to frequent such pleasant places and more.

I didn't realize it was a documentary of about ten hours, in its original language and subtitled, to be watched over four evenings with a follow-up debate.

About ten years earlier, I had ignored the national premiere on Rai 3, due to youth; had I been less clueless, I would have ignored it anyway, due to its unreasonable broadcast time.

It's better this way, otherwise, I would never have found myself in that club.

A documentary, then.

The documented theme was clear.

It was a story of the drowned and the saved, to quote Primo Levi.

Or, of mice and cats, for those who preferred Art Spiegelman's strips known through Linus.

In form, it was a documentary, but in essence, it was something else entirely.

It was a cold and aseptic analysis, and the subjects of that analysis were they, the drowned and the saved, the mice and the cats.

It was the result of eleven years spent gathering and editing testimonies.

Claude Lanzmann was the doctor dissecting the corpse in a forensic medicine session: no emotion, just the intent to know and spread knowledge.

On film was the testimony of Franz Suchomel, an SS sergeant stationed at Treblinka: he used a long pointer, like a good teacher from the past, to detail every aspect of a gas chamber's operation.

Like in driving school, when the instructor, with his pointer, detailed for me the individual parts and operation of the engine: the same, methodical, cold precision in the details.

No photographic records, no period footage, only oral accounts: the Holocaust was not shown, but narrated.

And along with that narration, few tears flowed, rare sobs.

Like the doctor dissecting the corpse, no emotion in him and in the learners surrounding him.

The corpse lying on the table, then, had played its last emotion who knows when.

The worst was when I left the club at the end of the fourth evening.

Because I couldn't comprehend Sergeant Suchomel intently detailing the workings of a gas chamber in the Treblinka concentration camp, and I felt I never would.

And I couldn't comprehend how it had been possible for someone to spend eleven years of their life imprinting ten hours of film, and dedicate ten minutes of that film to Sergeant Suchomel.

Least of all, I conceived the sterile debate tinged with futile ideology, which betrayed the clear coldness of Lanzmann's work.

Behold, the only thing I intuited was the approach to shelve in front of works like "Shoah."

Years later, I read what Simone de Beauvoir wrote about it and began to fear the boogeyman less.

And also to understand why someone had dedicated eleven years of their life to such a project.

"My film is a cinematic masterpiece, a work of art recognized as such" (Claude Lanzmann).