Replying to a bunch of different points in this thread. This is probably
longer than most want to read, but I'm replying to various posts in the
order they were made, so scroll down for "your" reply if you don't want
to read the whole thing.

Bill and Fred V., I didn't think anyone was maligning my taste either,
but it wouldn't have been so awful if someone were to do so. On our
no-flame board the correct way to say that is "I don't agree with your
taste at all," rather than "You have bad taste," but there isn't a whole
lot of difference between those two statements. I got in trouble once,
as I should have, in another group (famous for its flames, and with no
prohibition against them) for saying something like, "Anyone who likes
Matthew Barney doesn't understand cinema," which I should have stated as
"Most of the time when someone likes Matthew Barney it seems to predict
that they don't share my taste in cinema," but I think a lot of us *do*
normalize at least some aspects of our tastes into "good cinema."

As I've said already, I don't think the lesson of "Shoah" is that one
cannot show footage of corpses, or holocaust corpses, in film, but only
that it's worth questioning the decision to do so, to see if the terms
in which "Shoah" poses the argument might apply. But the "argument" of
"Shoah" is specifically against representing certain things, not any
thing; it could not oppose all representation, since the film consists
of nine and a half hours of scenes and interviews from the more recent
present.

Fred V., thanks for the Adorno quote, but I'm sure I've read his
"recantation" in a different context, though I have no idea where,
because what I read gave as the reason for the recantation that he's
read good or great poetry since the Holocaust itself constituted
evidence that it was possible to write poetry. And again, without
getting into a length OT debate, Israel's violation of the UN
resolutions calling for withdrawal for almost 40 years is
unconscionable, and every new settlement even more so, but also keep in
mind that for its first decades Israel lived surrounded by states that
refused to recognize it as a state and also talked about making war on
it and pushing all the Jews into the sea. There's plenty of blame to go
around on both sides, and one could go back at least to the Arab
mass-murders of Jews in Palestine in 1929. I'm not an expert on this,
and perhaps some ur-Sharon provoked those too, though from what I know
it was provoked by Arab lies about destroyed mosques, and at least some
of the Zionists were buying land from Palestinians rather than stealing
it. And one could go back into Jewish history to say that when Jews are
murdered, the surviving Jews have good reason to be extra-fearful, an
"effect" that became rather heightened after 1945, and with good reason.

About Lanzmann, I'm in general never in favor of destroying footage. And
about wondering what "secret" footage survives, the sicko in me has
always wondered about the presumably ur-Warhol-in-"style" movie that was
supposedly made for Hitler of the 1944 coup plotters being tortured to
death, hung on wire nooses that killed slowly, which he is said to have
seen and liked. I don't want to see it, though, and I don't think I want
it to be shown (or released on VHS and DVD!) if it exists, but I'd be
curious to hear it described. It certainly would be an early and true
example of the "snuff" film.

Thanks to JPC for the translation. Insofar as I could understand the
text, I agree with it. I know I've seen Lanzmann quoted in outrage at
the attempts to understand Hitler psychologically, to understand Hitler
as anything other than pure evil. I reject this notion. Hitler was human
just like the rest of us: that's the really horrible thing about him,
that he reveals not some inhuman other but what we humans are actually
capable of. I *want* to understand the things that helped form Hitler,
insofar as that is possible.

At the time of "Shoah's" release it was my impression that the Shoah
still had not received proper attention in our culture. Now it's if
anything received too much attention. It's easy to feel that this the
Holocaust was a very evil thing, but it's gotten to the point where
doing so has become a kind of feel-good exercise which makes "us" feel
morally superior. And I'm not sure it does us any good. It may even do
harm, in for instance justifying Israeli's own immoral actions. And back
when I watched television, in the early 90s, I saw a news report at the
time of the first revelations of Serbian-run concentration camps in
Bosnia. We saw horrifyingly emaciated Bosnian prisoners behind barbed
wire as the reporter intoned, "We have seen these pictures before." But
at the time when it would have helped, Europe did nothing and the U.S.
did nothing, proving that, as Ernie Gehr said to me in great anger at
the outbreak of Gulf War I, "We have learned *nothing*." Too bad for the
Bosnians they didn't have any oil.

I don't think any of this argues against my original point, though; it
does expand the discussion of "Shoah."

To Bill, thanks for the Oudart. And yeah, the point of the "Night and
Fog" cutting is I think the absurdity, the unexplainability, of the
Shoah, and the disjunctive cutting does work to that end. About the
beginning of modernity in film sound, don't forget Vertov's "Enthusiasm"
-- or, for that matter, "L'Age d'Or."

To Dan, I think part of the effect of "Shoah," which I don't think can
fairly be called mystifying, is to argue that the real significance of
the event is not the corpses, which are no longer the people killed, but
rather the absence of the lives and communities and future that the
Germans annihilated. This seems a pretty self-evident point. But how do
you show an absence? By creating an imagined void at the center of your
film, by making one of the longest documentaries ever with no images of
its ostensible subject. Resnais's film concentrates on the
inexplicability of the event, treating it as a rupture to our calm
present; Lanzmann's deals with the event's implications. I suppose we
await the biopic "Hitler's Childhood" (or has it already been made?) to
tell us about causes (sarcasm intended).

To Andy, I didn't get what you did from "Night and Fog," but it's been
ages since I've seen it, and your comments made me realize I should see
it again. I'll put my comments on "Elephant" into a separate post.

- Fred