A MODO DE CONCLUSIÒN Encontramos

The design and construction of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah serves as the current project’s methodological model. Lanzmann’s film deals with material resistant to representation, without reducing the obscene status of that material to either sensational entertainment or consolatory kitsch. Instead it constructs an

unprecedented experience of the obscenity’s force without reverting to orthodox representational conventions. Some of the salient and innovative features of Lanzmann’s project, the techniques and procedures he deploys, are tabled below in summary form. I cannot stress enough: the current project deals with a realm of experience utterly unrelated to that dealt with in Shoah yet the epistemic problems of both projects are akin. After itemising Lanzmann’s procedures and techniques, they have been reconfigured in overtly performative terms and applied to the current project as its methods.

Lanzmann’s Shoah Methodological Principles Obscenities Offstage

• No archival footage is included; all footage was filmed by Lanzmann and his crew from 1976-81. • The major Nazi leaders are

neither discussed nor depicted and are rarely mentioned.

• The word “Holocaust” is never uttered, nor is it offered as a subtitled English translation of a word uttered in any other language.

• No iconic swastika or yellow star is shown.

• A fundamental critical interrogation, rethinking, and, where possible, eschewing of generic categories, conventional iconography, and other “naturalised” representations. • A defamiliarisation, or “strange-making”, of the familiar. • Including as interviewees those figures who identify outside the obvious categories of “gay” and “male”.

• Resisting the HIV/AIDS

imperative that has driven and dominated sauna research since 1981. • Focussing on the little

researched context of contemporary Melbourne. • Sustaining an ongoing

interrogation (effectively, a resistance to reification) of the conceptual categories of

• Large amounts of screen- time are devoted to footage of streets, highways, railway sidings, woods and houses.

gender, sexuality, erotics and space, and of their attendant phenomena. • Researching from the

epistemic perspective of performance.

• The interviewer, Lanzmann, and his various interpreter- assistants are audibly and visually foregrounded alongside the informants. • When an interview requires

an interpreter, the time- consuming work of

translating speech from one language to another is never edited out of the film. • Lanzmann includes in the

final cut of the film episodes that expose the fragility of the film-making process (informants insisting on prematurely ending their interviews, interpreters caught out not translating accurately). • Lanzmann includes in the

final cut of the film episodes that expose his unprofessional conduct in pursuit of his obsessions (cajoling, coercing, lying).

• A critical and active resistance to the deployment of

phantasmagoria (that is, the naturalised elision of the means of production). • A rendering visible of the

means of production.

• Acknowledging the

researcher’s presence, my presence, in the scene of the research; working conceptually from and with the first person singular.

• Acknowledging the

researcher’s presence, my presence, in the scene of the sauna by allowing my own testimony to emerge freely in the interview. • Publishing interview

transcripts in their entirety as appendices to the thesis. • Reflexively (de)constructing

the academic thesis as theatre; removing its “fourth wall”.

• The interviews are staged variously. Some

interviewees are interviewed in their homes, some are interviewed at the site where the events they witnessed occurred (Simon Srebnik is flown from Israel to Poland for this purpose), and some are interviewed in sites which fictitiously evoke the situation of the testimony (a forest in Israel standing for one in

Lithuania).

• Some interviews are actively cultivated by Lanzmann to include episodes where the interview threatens to prematurely end, where its fragility and vulnerability is exposed. Such moments present as limits of

• An awareness that the interview is a performance; that is, that as an event it is a mediated, contingent intervention in history, that it does not exist outside ideology, and that it is conceived, constructed, enacted and comprehended as an aesthetic form.

• Developing the form of each interview in collaboration with each interviewee.

• Working with the time and place of each interview, its scene, as an element actively and reflexively informing it. • Creating a safe and

supportive environment in which interviewees can reflect on and give voice to previously unuttered experiences.

• Encouraging each

interviewee to visit a limit of representation in his or her testimony.

• Supporting the interviewees sensitively and efficaciously in this process; effectively, directing the performer.

representation.

• All but one of Lanzmann’s interviewees offers

testimony as an eye-witness; each testifies as a custodian of a lived experience that is unique.

• Questions are often conceived in terms of specific, often minute, concrete detail: the colour of a gas van, the number of paces from a siding to a gate.

• Questions seeking articulations of abstract theories or psychological explanations are rarely if ever asked at all.

• The one interviewee who is not a direct witness, the historian Raul Hilberg, is also mostly interviewed at the level of minute, concrete detail, rather than in terms of abstract theory or general ideas. At one point, when he reads from a Warsaw ghetto diary, he becomes a mouthpiece or medium for testimony from a witness who is dead.

• A privileging of witness and testimony as “the performance of a story constituted by the fact that, like the oath, it cannot be carried out by anybody else” (Felman, 1994: 92).

• A recognition that testimony, like the psychoanalytic scene, entails: a search for truth through an act of speech; a quest of memory; a temporal disruption of chronology; an interest in specific, concrete detail; an operation at a limit of understanding (Felman in Lanzmann, 1995a: 202- 203).

• Selecting and interviewing interviewees not as experts but as witnesses, as custodians of lived experiences that are not typical but unique.

• Allowing each interview to develop as the performance of a story that cannot be carried out by anyone else. • Conceiving and asking

questions at the level of minute, concrete specifics. • Avoiding abstractions. • Asking “how” rather than

“why”.

• Assessing the consistency of each interviewee’s testimony by staging verificatory follow-up interviews six months after the initial in-depth

interview (a process not identical with assessing the accuracy of each witness’ testimony by testing it against a version of so- called objective reality). • Researching saunas at the

level of the subject, not the object.

• The film does not intend to offer a new “documentary” account of the destruction of the European Jews (Lanzmann, 1995a: 211). • No historical overview

(omniscient knowledge) is offered or implied. • The film relentlessly

resonates with an intense awareness of the “present”: of the moment in history contemporary with the film being made and

(unexpectedly) with the moment in history of it being viewed.

• The film’s discontinuous and fragmentary material achieves order, clarity and intelligibility through a series of formal

• An insistence on the

epistemic value of art. •

Producing the thesis, at every stage, as one would make an artistic

performance (a work). • Achieving epistemic order,

clarity and intelligibility through a series of formal constellations.

• Conceiving, researching, and producing the thesis as theatre.

constellations specific to it as a work of cinema: “…what interests me is the film. One has been able to discuss Nazism for forty years. One doesn’t need the film for that.” (Lanzmann in LaCapra, 1997: 232). • The film’s form is

unprecedented.

• “I am often asked, “When did you know what happened to the Jews during the war?” The most honest answer I can give is that I started to know really when I started to work on the film.” (Lanzmann, 1995a: 211).