Claude Lanzmann's A VISITOR FROM THE LIVING
October 6 and 7, 1999
Sponsored by Grand Marnier
Additional suppport from La Perla
and the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
photo: director Claude Lanzmann
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the 37th new york film festival at the walter reade theater:
Claude Lanzmann's A VISITOR FROM THE LIVING October 6 and 7, 1999 Sponsored by Grand Marnier Additional suppport from La Perla
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Main Program |
Views from the Avant-Garde |
Pietro Germi Retrospective |
Kusturica's UNDERGROUND |
THE MAN WHO LAUGHS |
Lanzmann's A VISITOR FROM THE LIVING | NYFF Archive
Lanzmann constructed this extraordinarily complex and powerful documentary around an interview he conducted with Maurice Rossel in 1979 during the shooting of Shoah. Hoping to escape the boredom of army service as a border-guard, young Rossel asked an old friend to help him sign up as an International Red Cross representative in Berlin during WWII. The main task of such representatives was to visit POW camps, guarantee the observance of the Geneva Convention and insure the delivery of packages. Yet, in 1943, Maurice Rossel was the only International Red Cross representative to go to Auschwitz, when it was working at maximum efficiency as a death camp. He witnessed no horrors-except for skeletal prisoners who gazed at him as "a visitor from the living"-and enjoyed a pleasant half-hour chat with the "elegant" camp commander before taking his leave. Rossel also headed the Red Cross delegation in June 1944 to inspect the "model ghetto" at Theresienstadt. As Lanzmann questions him about his impressions of this totally staged showplace, the self-possessed, silver-haired Rossel betrays his enduring prejudices: struck to this day by the "servility" and "passivity" of the Jews he saw at Theresienstadt--all prominent, rich men, he asserts--Rossel remains impassive, perhaps unconvinced as Lanzmann inundates him with the appalling realities of the place, the fates of the men he found so "docile." A small, telling detail: Rossel recalls even the blue eyes of the Auschwitz commandant, but the Dr. Epstein who was his guide through Theresienstadt has completely slipped from memory. (Epstein was executed a few months after the Red Cross visit; Lanzmann reads the heartbreaking New Year's speech that doomed him.) In this shattering 65-minute conversation with a perfectly civilized gentleman, Lanzmann documents how the Holocaust could have been allowed to happen by a world full of "decent" human beings.
65 minutes, France; 1997.
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