Film

An Uprising Remembered

     Claude Lanzmann looks tired.
     The journalist and documentary filmmaker whose new film, "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.", is opening two days after this conversation, has been in New York City for only a day, clearly suffering from jet lag, but he senses a change in the town.
     "The streets are much more empty," he says. "I was in a restaurant last night which is usually overflowing and there was a lot of space."
     He grimaces and shakes his head.
     "It was a real shock to land in Newark on a beautiful bright day and to discover the skyline of Manhattan with the place of ‘the twins' empty, a pile of debris . . . and the smoke."
     Lanzmann, who began his career as a journalist, a protégé of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and eventually took over the editorship of their journal, "Les Temps Modernes", is now 76, although he doesn't look it, even on a day on which he repeatedly rubs his hand across his eyes. On one occasion, he pauses in answering a question and mutters distractedly, "Je suis fatigué," and seems barely able to hold his leonine head erect.
     But this trip is part of the completion of a journey of a different sort, a journey through time, both personal and historical.   "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m." -- and Lanzmann insists at one point in an interview that the full title be given -- is the third film he has made about the memories of Holocaust witnesses and survivors. "Shoah", that nine-and-a-half-hour monument to the dead and living victims of the Nazis' "Final Solution" to the Jewish Question, took him eleven years to make. To revisit that subject again in 1997 with "A Visitor From the Living" and once more with the new film must have taken no small toll on him.
     During a press conference at the New York Film Festival, Lanzmann describes the decision to make "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.", returning to footage he shot for "Shoah" as one that "took courage." It would require him "to reenter this [place and time], to recover the passage of time." It was, after all, more than 20 years since he had shot footage of Yehuda Lerner, who had been an integral part of the uprising of Jewish prisoners at the death camp of Sobibor.
     "It cost me much to return 20 years after," he said at the press conference. "I did not want to work, but I was wrong."
     Lanzmann has taken off his jacket and his glasses. His dark red tie is pulled away from the collar of an elegant light gray shirt and he is thinking again about how difficult it was to go back in personal time.
     "In order to work eleven years to produce a film, an "opus", it is necessary that time stops," he explains. "If not, you cannot stay so long on a single work. I would look over my shoulder [while making the film] and see ‘it's two years, three years, four years, six years, eight, nine . . . I was frightened when I became aware of this."
     He pauses and shakes his head slowly.
     "When you finish a film like "Shoah", you are in a strange state of mind,"he continues. "It as a bit cataclysmic for me. I had to recover ‘normal time,'which I didn't achieve completely. It was necessary for me to wait for a new birth of time."
     And with a new birth of time, he was able to return to the footage of Lerner which is the heart of "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.".
     "The Sobibor film is an offspring of "Shoah", an effluent, a tributary off a huge delta," he acknowledges easily. "It is the same structure. I think that's appropriate to the story."
     Sobibor itself hadn't changed much in two decades. Lanzmann explains, "It's a beautiful place, Sobibor. There were a few changes since 1978. The station is more dilapidated than it was back then. The ramp where the Jews disembarked at the camp is now covered by concrete to allow timber to be loaded in open freight cars. There are no more steam locomotives, only some kind of diesel."
     Perhaps the largest change is one that Lanzmann suggests obliquely in both the film and in conversation, and that is in the attitude of the post-Communist Polish government and the Polish people to the events of 1939-1945. There is now a small museum at Sobibor and a memorial to the dead of the Warsaw Ghetto at the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw, both of which figure in Lanzmann's new film.
     "It's very complicated, more complex," the filmmaker says of current Polish-Jewish relations. The Poles have publicly commemorated the Shoah in a way that other European nations haven't "Poland is the only place in the world where you can drive on a highway and see a sign with an arrow, ‘Extermination camp.' In Warsaw you have an avenue named for Mordecai Anielewicz," the leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto.
     The beginning of that new spirit of acceptance may well be traced to the furor that surrounded "Shoah". Lanzmann says, "I'm sure it was a shock for the Poles, even ones who didn't see the film. There were hundreds of articles in the Polish press. It helped them to become aware of what took place."
     After three films that total nearly a dozen hours in running time, is Lanzmann finally finished with the subject of the Shoah?
     "I don't know," he says. "There are aspects of the Shoah that cannot be explored by my methods because there's nobody left alive to testify -- the Nazis' [policy of] destruction succeeded."
     What will he do for his next film?
     He smiles wearily, "I don't know."
     For now, he will wait for time to be born once more.

"Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m." is playing at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway (between 62 and 63rd Streets). For showtimes call 212 757-2280.