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‘All I Had Was Nothingness’ Director on the Despair That Haunted ‘Shoah’ Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann
Documentary “All I Had Was Nothingness," which looks at the making of “Shoah,” has its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.
One striking aspect of the film is how Lanzmann sought to elicit the memories of the witnesses by getting them to re-enact past events, such as with the barber, Abraham Bomba, who was forced to cut off the women’s hair before they entered the gas chambers, or the train driver who transported the Jews to the camps. At the core of the film is the revelation that Lanzmann, as he travelled the world over five years trying to piece together the evidence, was riven by self-doubt, uncertain whether what he was doing would amount to anything of value, a feeling that at times approached despair. The film ends with a denouement of sorts when Lanzmann meets a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and he is able to explain what he has achieved: he was able to accompany the victims as they approached their deaths, so that they did not die alone.
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