Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [206]
She followed this equivocal opening with an objection to Lanzmann’s interviewing techniques: “We watch him putting pressure on people—pouncing on a detail here or there—and we register the silences, the hesitancies, the breakdowns . . . sitting in a theatre seat for a film as full of dead spaces as this one seems to me a form of self-punishment.” She went on to compare Shoah unfavorably with the level of moral complexity presented in The Sorrow and the Pity, with “so many widely differing instances of collaboration and resistance, and such a steady accumulation of perspectives.” In Shoah Lanzmann seemed to be stacking the deck to show an entire world of blind cruelty, and as a result, she felt there was no way into the movie. It wasn’t quite so much what the film was saying as its way of saying it that disturbed her. “It’s not just the exact procedures used in the extermination process that Lanzmann is hunting down,” she wrote. “He’s after the Gentiles’ attitudes toward the process. Shoah presents a world in which a Gentile rarely shows any human feeling toward a Jew. The Polish peasants who saw Jewish children being thrown into vans by their feet don’t seem to have been upset, or even touched.” She believed that Lanzmann’s principal motive in making the film “appears to be to show you that the Gentiles will do it to the Jews again if they get a chance.” It was a tough and provocative line of thinking, but toward the end of her review, she nearly tumbled off the path of her argument when she said, “The film is diffuse, but Lanzmann is blunt-minded: he’s out to indict the callous. If you were to set him loose, he could probably find anti-Semitism anywhere.” It was a stunning lapse of judgment, considering that Lanzmann was looking for anti-Semitism in the most obvious of places—the death camps. While Pauline’s intellectual honesty was admirable, it was difficult to shake off the feeling that her thinking was influenced by other factors, of which she was only partly conscious.
Lillian Ross recalled,
The Shoah reaction was especially peculiar. I went with Shawn to the two screenings of the documentary, and we agreed with most critics that it was a significant contribution to the record of the horrific Nazi period in history. The documentary was not being offered for judgment of its cinematic technical virtues. Shawn tried to clarify its role, in talking to Pauline Kael about it. With his inimitable patience, he always tried earnestly to reason with anyone clinging stubbornly to unreasonable prejudice or purposes. It might be that Kael’s megalomaniacal possession of anything called film led to her resentment of the director Claude Lanzmann as an interloper in her territory, and therefore she insisted that Shoah had to be reviewed only as a movie. It might be that Kael’s own Jewish heritage accounted for her need to harbor complicated and perverse ways of demonstrating that she was free of the painful abhorrence of the holocaust felt by other people. I don’t know. Shawn ran her ‘review’ as she insisted.
Shawn’s fears about Pauline’s response to the movie proved justified: Her comments proved antagonistic to the Jewish community, in New York and elsewhere. There was an immediate outcry from the respected critic Alfred Kazin, from The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier, and from her by now regular adversary, The Village Voice, represented this time by J. Hoberman. Wieseltier went so far as to suggest that she didn’t see Shoah’s worth because the movie refrained from depicting the violence to which she was obviously addicted; he said she might have liked it better if it had been directed by Brian De Palma.
One of the most incensed readers was Dan Talbot, who wrote a long letter of protest to Pauline, and copied Shawn on it:
I’m upset about how unmoved you represent yourself