I recently revisited some writing on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, considering how his use of image and sound (what I would call, not without some conceptual leaps, a single-shot montage) might enact a Levinasian conception of the relation between the Saying and the Said. My interest in Lanzmann’s film is therefore two-fold: how it conceives and enacts cinematic language and the sense of the ethical in that conceiving and enactment. Lanzmann is famously stringent on both accounts.

For Lanzmann, the principle of blindness is crucial; we cannot see what is filmed, he cannot see what he seeks to film, so the cinematic image has to be responsible to this blindness as both an epistemic and ethical principle or command. Thus, Lanzmann’s rather excessive attacks on Spielberg (though I think he’s essentially right about Spielberg’s Schindler’s List). There is surely more discussion to be had about Lanzmann’s successes and/or failures in relation to these principles. But then I was so surprised to find that a trailer exists for the film. See the following trailer, available to “advertise” Shoah’s inclusion in the Masters of Cinema series:

What a funky trailer.

To begin, there are no words and very little sound in the trailer (which also rarely matches or productively mis-matches the images). In the film itself, the intersection of sound and image – typically to the point of interruption – is crucial for Lanzmann’s cinematic strategy. The narration of traumatic memory, something already interrupted by the hesitations and gaps in the speaker’s telling, is doubled in its interruption by long shots of memorials, ruins, and faces. Lanzmann’s doubled interruption proceeds only by way of words; testimony is first, calling forth some sort of image within which blindness can be said to manifest. Without testimony, there is only image without context or, much worse still, images that have become familiar. Surely we’ve all seen the trains, the gate to Auschwitz. The full film of Shoah counts on the familiarity of these images, actually, insofar as Lanzmann wants to put it all in question, disturb all of our senses of fitting the film’s parts together. One can only interrupt that which sets itself up as home. At home in a series of shots, Lanzmann’s use of testimony and the camera underscore the profound epistemological and ethical violence of that home-ness. The trailer leaves the sites familiar, repeating the very violence whose contestation motivates Lanzmann’s work.

The lack of words also make all the more problematic the presence of the other central images: faces. Who are these faces? What are their stories? This is not simply to say that the faces are silent (though that is problematic enough). More significantly, I think, it casts aside the critical triad Lanzmann adopts from Raul Hilberg: victim, perpetrator, bystander. All are there, actually, but how could we know? The story of each face, which is at the same time the moral category, is set aside for the sake of a pithy teaser.

“For the sake of…” And herein lies the really problematic moment: the claiming of Shoah by capital. The trailer is a teaser so that one sees or buys the film, nothing more or less to it. A trailer can be compelling or exciting or a variety of other synomyms. It is at best only a proxy for art. The trailer invites us to consume – that’s essentially how we measure its success.

But if there is one effect of Shoah – indeed, an obstinate effect – it is the resistance of the film to any form of consumption. I recall the first time I showed Shoah to a class. The first of four segments, the first class following – I asked what folks thought of the film. First remark: could we see it in smaller portions? It is so impossible to bear, all the sadness and violence and loss. I simply suggested that the point of the film is exactly that, to be so long and difficult to bear that we approximate the precipice at the abyss between survivor and witness to the survivor (we viewers). And that it might be problematic to stand apart from this precipice. After all, the survivor cannot forget or live only in short segments. That simple suggestion brought the film into its proper focus and cleared the space, intellectual and emotional, to be exhausted and rendered silent as a kind of moral and epistemological engagement. I think that was the right way to get toward the film (one is never, by design, in the film).

So, the movement of the film toward capital exchange(s) is particularly strange and problematic. Shoah is above all a film about filming transcendence, in this case the inversion of the sublime in the abyss of loss. A trailer cannot get us to that abyss. What might be a claim only about enduring or not enduring time – say, if the trailer contained a testimony in some detail, but was simply too brief for the unbearable character of Shoah’s time – becomes in this trailer an actual betrayal of the terms of filmmaking: identification as victim/perpetrator/bystander, structures of interruption, transcendence. This is only more pressing as a question because Lanzmann has been, for better or worse, so stridently moral in his discussion of his and other Holocaust films.

In this sense, it is fitting that the trailer quotes Lanzmann’s citation of Isaiah 56:5, which declares that an everlasting name shall be given. A brilliant and complex citation on Lanzmann’s part, as it brings our attention to just how complex a proper name can be. The name brings nothing to presence, but performs an elliptical function, turning us toward the named – in this case, toward the name “Shoah,” which is the impossible name of the disaster to which the film gives testimony. The trailer undoes that name in the movement of the film to capital and logics of exchange. There is no exchange in Shoah. There is only the peculiar kind of overwhelming one has by way of an abyss of loss.

Thus, an ethics of trailers. Lanzmann’s film makes no sense without the epistemological and ethical challenge. He wouldn’t want it any other way. So, what does it mean to render a trailer of the film short, wordless, and in the exchange economy? Not sure of the proper word here. Let’s just call it “problematic.”