This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps; it is also the 40th anniversary of the release of “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s groundbreaking film that redefined how the Holocaust was viewed. On Monday, documentary “All I Had Was Nothingness,” which looks at the making of “Shoah,” has its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Variety spoke to its director, Guillaume Ribot.
“All I Had Was Nothingness” is based on Lanzmann’s memoir “The Patagonian Hare” – which, read by Ribot himself, provides the voiceover to the film – and utilizes footage taken from 220 hours of outtakes from “Shoah.” The memoir gave Ribot “the possibility of seeing the train of thoughts of [Lanzmann] and the ingredients that he needed in order to make such an opus, which is his determination and courage,” he says.
The challenge for Lanzmann, Ribot explains, was that most of the camps had been obliterated. “There’s nothing there but ruins and barbed wire,” Ribot says, adding that you can’t understand what happened at the camps just by going to where they once stood.
At the beginning of “All I Had Was Nothingness,” Lanzmann is heard saying, “I wanted to film, but all I had was nothingness.” He is presented as if he were a detective, unsure of how to crack the case. In order to piece together the evidence, he decides to track down the survivors, perpetrators and bystanders, and attempt to interview them – not an easy task given the trauma that had been inflicted on the survivors and the grim determination of the killers to evade justice.
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.
