I haven't seen "Sobibor." I liked "A Visitor From the Living" OK but not
particularly as "art." That Lanzmann might be meglomaniacal should not
affect any assessment of his work, since we know that many great artists
are, or were, meglomaniacs. And to retreat to my base theoretical
position, I agree that anything can be good, or great, including a
tasteless Holocaust melodrama that misrepresents everything, though I've
not seen any examples of same. But I used to joke that it would take
something really awful both aesthetically and morally to get me to write
a negative review of an art exhibit by an unknown, and my example was
often "holocaust porn," though I didn't have a clear idea what that
might be. Then I saw some collaged photos by Boris Laurie that included
concentration camp images and naked women, and thought that in a
horrible way they were actually really good. I supposed it helped me in
announcing that opinion that he wasn't some art school punk but a Jewish
survivor of more than one Nazi camp. But still, anything can be good.

That said, I *do* think there is an important issue around the nature of
film imagery, and its psychological effect on the viewer, that "Shoah"
articulates beautifully and movingly. This is something that I've been
thinking about for years, and that goes back as well to the fact that
the alleged first film shows the filmmakers' employees leaving his
factory at the time of his choosing. The standard range of possessive
relationships between filmmaker and image, and between viewer and image,
is questioned rather profoundly in "Shoah."

- Fred