Shoah director’s long list of lovers
Claude Lanzmann, who has died aged 92, was a cosmopolitan French intellectual known for his philosophical exploration, baroque amatory arrangements and, above all, his nine-hour documentary film Shoah.
The 1986 film Shoah was commissioned in 1973 by Alouph Hareven, a friend in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who suggested that he make a film about the Holocaust from ‘‘the viewpoint of the Jews’’. Lanzmann finally completed the project more than a decade later, having lost the Israeli government’s backing in the meantime.
He tracked down and interviewed death camp survivors, SS officers, Nazi bureaucrats and many others who bore witness to the suffering of the Jews, often taking them to the sites where the camps had been. Among those who appeared in the film was a man who had survived by working as a barber; at one point he mimed the motion of cutting women’s hair for further use after they had been gassed.
Some of the former Nazi interviewees insisted that only their voices be recorded. Lanzmann deceived them by concealing an expensive video camera in a bag, which relayed footage to a blacked-out minivan. This ruse worked well until, in the course of one interview, the device started to emit smoke and Lanzmann was obliged to flee the scene at high speed. A court case was brought but dismissed, and Lanzmann raised funds for a new camera.
Lanzmann never used the word Holocaust, disliking its connotation of an offering or sacrifice; he saw the Biblical term Shoah as a resonant synonym for destruction.
In The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, published in 2012, he recalled learning about inmates at Treblinka who ‘‘ate and made love in the unbearable stench of charred flesh, of bodies being buried in pits to eliminate any trace of the extermination, and in the even more intolerable stink of putrefaction from mass graves. Dusk and daybreak, when dew settles at morning and evening, were the worst, because the smell did not rise, did not drift, but hung in the air at ground level, leaching into every corner of every house, into even the least delicate nose.’’
Born in Paris to a Jewish family that had fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe, Claude Lanzmann was the eldest of three children. His brother was the writer Jacques Lanzmann. The marriage of their parents, Armand and Paulette, had been arranged and was not a success. Life in a small apartment with three young children led to Armand firing a revolver in his wife’s general direction, filling the wall with holes.
Claude’s education was interrupted by the German invasion of France, when he and his family pretended to be Arabs to escape persecution. In 1943 Claude and Jacques joined the Communist resistance. At one point Jacques was taken captive by the Germans and was due to be executed by firing squad, but escaped.
After the war Lanzmann returned to his studies, and launched into a series of dalliances with women. He also became a devotee of JeanPaul Sartre. From 1952 to 1959 he lived with the writer (and Sartre’s lover) Simone de Beauvoir, with whom he claimed a rapport ‘‘both intellectual and carnal’’.
Their relationship was by no means exclusive. Simone simultaneously continued her relationship with Sartre (who, competitively and somewhat incestuously, set up Lanzmann’s actress sister Evelyne in a flat as a mistress), while Lanzmann, on a visit to North Korea, claimed to have fallen into a passionate embrace with a beautiful hospital nurse who arrived at his hotel to administer an intramuscular injection in the buttocks with vitamin B12 – a medical fad at the time.
Despite being unable to speak each other’s language, they embarked on a romantic but chaotic boating trip in Pyongyang. Their affair was not consummated, but reached an erotic climax, according to Lanzmann, in her partly undressing and revealing a scar on her breast from a recent napalm attack. They were parted after a scary encounter with the authorities that Lanzmann was apparently able to brazen out because of his VIP status.
In 2017 he returned to North Korea, purportedly for a film about martial arts, in fact to make Napalm, a film chronicle of a romantic interlude that he likened to Brief Encounter, rebutting interviewers’ suggestions that it had been a honeytrap.
His journalism included accounts of underwater expeditions with Jacques Cousteau, a tour of China, an interview with the 24-year old Dalai Lama shortly after he had been forced into exile by the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and a visit to Algeria during its war of independence from France.
Such articles led to documentary work including Pourquoi Israel (1973); he had embarked on it partly as an excuse to visit the actress and writer Angelika Schrobsdorff, whom he married in 1974. She was the second of his three wives, his marriage in 1963 to the French actress Judith Magre having ended in 1971.
Lanzmann, however, seems not to have confined his amatory adventures to the marital bed. In a review of his memoirs, the Sunday Telegraph Magazine drew attention to Lanzmann’s ‘‘copious sexual bragging’’: ‘‘Sex goddesses trusted him. ‘I met them all,’ he writes of Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau, [Brigitte] Bardot, Liz Taylor and Ava Gardner, ‘and I can say without vanity that I helped some of them to make a qualitative leap in their careers.’
‘‘When young he was a ‘past-master’ at the silky hypocrisies needed to get women into bed, but came to ‘loathe . . . the billing and cooing of courtship [as] a waste of time . . . these days I head straight for ‘the thing itself’, which suits me. This repugnance probably explains my taste for womanly women, and my lack of interest in virgins’.’’
The various films Lanzmann directed after Shoah, such as Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4pm (2001) and The Last of the Unjust (2013) were essentially extended footnotes to Shoah. His last film, The Four Sisters: The Hippocratic Oath, the first in a four-part series, consisting of a 90-minute interview with Auschwitz survivor Ruth Elias, was released this week.
Lanzmann divorced a second time and married Dominique Petithory, with whom he already had a son, in 1995. She survives him with a daughter from a previous relationship, born in 1950. –
‘‘When young he was a ‘past-master’ at the silky hypocrisies needed to get women into bed ...’’ Magazine reviewer on Lanzmann