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| | SHOAH'S ABSENCE, by Fred Camper |
 | | Lanzmann has spoken of the Germans' attempts to destroy the records of their genocide, and of having to make his film out of "traces of traces," but it is clear that the exclusion of images from that time, perhaps the filmmaker's single most important decision, was an aesthetic and, most importantly, moral choice. |
 | | Lanzmann's images have the opposite effect to that of images of corpses, which are so overwhelming that they become complete in themselves, irrefutable facts about which no other image can speak, and ultimately reek only of death. |
 | | Lanzmann's meditation is instead a dual one: on death, and on the life that was lost, the life that might have been, and to achieve this, his imagery must be open, his shots must refer to the imagination, to each other, to the unimaginable, rather than to the closure of a corpse. |
| www.fredcamper.com /Film/Lanzmann.html (3494 words) |
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