Rephotographing Shoah
Claude Lanzmann visited Poland with his crew in 1978 and 1979, shooting for Shoah (1985). DP Jimmy Glasberg recalls “working for Lanzmann means filming the unfilmable.” For him, shooting the arrival of the train at the Treblinka station was the hardest task both physically and artistically.
Balancing on the tender of Ty2 locomotive and leaning out of the door, Glasberg captured the moving train and its driver. Lanzmann rented a train for Henryk Gawkowski, a retired railroad worker who used to push cars with victims into the Treblinka death camp. In 2023, the tracks are gone and they have been replaced with an asphalt road, theslogans “Treblinka never more!” were retired, and there is a monument where trains were parked on the spur.
What is the meaning of landscape when witnesses are gone?
Rephotographing Shoah I had to take some educated guesses: what digital equivalents of the 16mm camera and vintage lenses to choose, how to find the original locations, and interpret changes in the landscapes. There are two corresponding sets of images: photographs revisiting the original shots and emulating the 16mm aesthetics (in the 4:3 aspect ratio) as well as panoramic shots (Cinemascope) analyzing the interaction of the crew with the sites. Photographs shown here were taken in…
Chełmno nad Nerem, Treblinka, Sobibór, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Warsaw.
Lanzmann divided the history of the Holocaust into two eras and this project is split into two chapters. The first one profits from the repetitive, attentive watching of Shoah and its outtakes. In the second chapter, I take liberties in reading the film, visually explaining how different scenes were created. These panoramic shots are envisioned as notes for a future film about the shooting of Shoah.