The Silenced face behind Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

Abstract

The work seeks to follow in the footsteps of Catherine Hebert's film, Ziva Postec, La monteuse derrière le film Shoah (Catherine Hébert, 2018), which presents the work of the editor Ziva Postec, an essential figure in Lanzmann's film, and erased from historiography (by the filmmaker, by the culture of male memory of the Shoah). Hébert's film, structured based on testimonies from the filmmaker and editor herself, details the creative procedures and the importance of the editor in organizing the material of more than 220 hours of interviews and recordings of places, in addition to the erasure perpetrated by Lanzmann himself, who neglected Postec after the film's premiere. The film about Postec, and other Holocaust Archives, exemplify the discrepancy between the evidence of male faces and the history of Holocaust testimonies, put to the test in decolonial and memorialistic studies of the Shoah.