‘All I Had Was Nothingness’ Director on the Despair That Haunted ‘Shoah’ Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann

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2025 marks significant milestones: 80 years since the liberation of Nazi concentration camps and 40 years since Claude Lanzmann‘s influential film “Shoah” was released, reshaping perceptions of the Holocaust. On Monday, the documentary “All I Had Was Nothingness,” focusing on the creation of “Shoah,” premieres at the Berlin Film Festival. I had the opportunity to interview its director, Guillaume Ribot.

The film “All I Had Was Nothingness” derives from Claude Lanzmann’s memoir “The Patagonian Hare,” narrated by Ribot himself. It employs footage from 220 hours of unused material from the documentary “Shoah.” According to Ribot, this memoir allowed him to understand Lanzmann’s thought process and the essential elements he required to create such a masterpiece – his resolve and bravery.

For Lanzmann, as Ribot points out, the difficulty lay in the fact that most of the concentration camps had been destroyed. “All that remains are ruins and barbed wire,” Ribot states, emphasizing that one cannot grasp the atrocities committed within the camps by simply visiting their former locations.

At the outset of “All I Had Was Nothingness,” Lanzmann is overheard stating, “I desired to film, yet I possessed only emptiness.” Portrayed as a detective grappling with an intricate mystery, he’s uncertain about how to solve it. To gather clues, he embarks on a mission to locate the survivors, culprits, and witnesses, intending to question them – a challenge considering the psychological trauma endured by the survivors and the relentless resolve of the perpetrators to elude justice.

One notable feature of the movie lies in Lanzmann’s approach to prompting memories from witnesses by asking them to re-enact past incidents. For instance, Abraham Bomba, a barber, was made to demonstrate his act of forcibly cutting women’s hair before they entered the gas chambers. Similarly, the train driver who transported Jews to the concentration camps was also asked to re-enact his role.

The heart of the movie lies in the disclosure that Lanzmann, during his global journeys spanning over five years to collect evidence, was frequently troubled by self-questioning, unsure if his efforts would yield anything meaningful, sometimes teetering on the edge of hopelessness.

The movie concludes by presenting a kind of resolution, where Lanzmann encounters a survivor from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He shares his accomplishments: by accompanying the victims on their way to death, he ensured they were not dying in solitude.

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2025-02-17 10:16