Lanzmann 3

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

I went to see Schindler's List with the best will of the world,  without the 
least bit of hostility. I told myself that there things of filmic  value, even 
though I was confronted over and over by the problem of the  depicting and 
the acting. But then I see how Spielberg shows people in the  Plaszow camp while 
they open mass graves to burn the corpses that are piled up  in them after 
the destruction of the Krakau ghetto. It is a short scene,  Spielberg is skilful 
enough to film quickly. In the beginning of Shoah,  two survivors from the 
Vilna ghetto and the famous Ponary woods relate how in  1944 they were forced to 
open graves and to dig up with their bare hands  cadavers which more and more 
resembled flat discs. The deeper they dug the  flatter the corpses became, 
and the Germans forbade them to pronounce the word  'death' or the word 
'victim'. They had to call them 'Figuren', which means  puppets, marionettes. In Shoah 
this is a shocking scene: two men  speaking to each other in a wood in 
Israel. Suddenly I realize that Spielberg  shows everything that I left out in 
Shoah. 
Humble and proud I sincerely thought that there was a time before  Shoah, and 
a time after Shoah, and that after Shoah  certain things could no longer be 
done. Spielberg did them anyway. I received a  letter from a journalist of the 
Evening Standard, who asked what I thought of  Schindler's List. He sad: "You 
can see how much you influenced  Spielberg." I answered that I could not see 
where my influence was. It is the  exact reverse: my influence has been 
negative. I have the feeling he has made an  illustrated Shoah, he has given images 
where these are absent in  Shoah, and images kill the imagination, because 
through Schindler, the  hero that is disputable, at the least, they allow a 
consoling  identification.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20050905/7ea70692/attachment.html>