The Last of the Unjust (2013): Shoah director still throws up genuine moral challenges (Review)

Claude Lanzmann’s complex, heavyweight and incredibly powerful new film The Last of the Unjust is a feature-length reworking of material gathered over the arduous twelve-year shoot for his defining work Shoah.  It is an interview with Benjamin Murmelstein, a Viennese rabbi appointed by the Nazis as “Elder” of Theresienstadt, the “model ghetto” which was presented to the Danish Red Cross in 1944 to persuade them that Jews were well-treated in Nazi camps.

From the start, the film has the feel of an elegy, not just to the victims of the Holocaust or even to Murmelstein, who died in 1989, but to Lanzmann’s own project.  This might be the 89-year-old director’s final film, and it seems to be business he could not bear to leave unfinished.  Much of the first half-hour of the 218-minute film is taken up with Lanzmann reading from Murmelstein’s autobiography, making his way around the modern-day locations Murmelstein describes, and explaining that he kept the footage out of Shoah out of fear that the moral conundrums it raised could not be addressed successfully as part of a larger project.

Lanzmann’s concern for these questions – most obviously, is it fair to describe Murmelstein as a Nazi collaborator? – lead to him taking more of an active role in the film than he usually does.  Several scenes show Lanzmann on his own, explaining his thoughts and feelings on the events the older interview covers.  I was worried at first that this would have too much of a TV-history feel, but Lanzmann uses this material sparingly, and is, frankly, right to feel Murmelstein’s story needs a moral clarity adding to it.

The bulk of the film is the interview with Murmelstein, which is astonishing.  Murmelstein was a scholar of comparative religion in his earlier life, and his speech is rich in theological, mythological and literary allusions.  He describes the role of the Elder as “tragicomic”, which is still more comedy than most people will be able to find in his story.  But he explains this in the context of the pagan fool rituals which will be familiar to viewers of The Wicker Man and Sleuth; a man of low status will be allowed to be king for the day, on the understanding that the day will end with his sacrifice.

The most resonant mythological parallel comes when Murmulstein compares himself to Scheherezade, the heroine of the Arabian nights.  Like Scheherezade, his survival is dependent on him spinning a tale – in this case, the tale of Theresienstadt as a happy village where Jews are not mistreated.  Though both Lanzmann and Murmulstein point out that Murmulstein’s negotiations with the Nazis saved some 123,000 Jewish lives, many people will be uneasy at the level of collusion with Adolf Eichmann Murmulstein needed to practice to achieve this.

Lanzmann knows this, and so does Murmulstein – the film’s title is the nickname he ironically gave himself.  While Murmulstein’s style of interview is too combative to be described as “special pleading”, he is eager to place his actions in the context of a time when the true scale of Nazi persecution of Jews was unknown.

In the excerpt of his autobiography read by Lanzmann at the start of the film, he describes the joy some Jews felt on hearing the Nazis had finally designed a safe and happy place for them to live, only to arrive at Theresienstadt and find the conditions brutal and poor.  It’s hard not to see a self-justification by Murmulstein in that passage, an explanation of why he held out hope against hope that he could negotiate with Eichmann.  This context is reinforced later in the film when he recalls meeting children from other concentration camps who had a puzzling – at the time – aversion to communal showers.

That said, Murmulstein was not completely naive.  There is a lot of time spent on his reading of Eichmann’s character, and it is radically different from the passionless bureaucrat Eichmann portrayed himself as when he was on trial in Jerusalem.  Murmulstein remembers Eichmann as a passionate and gleeful anti-Semite, personally participating in the sacking of a synagogue on Kristallnacht.  Had this evidence been presented at trial, Eichmann’s defence would have been shredded, but Murmulstein never visited Israel out of fear of reprisal for his wartime activities.

Throughout the film, you can see Lanzmann becoming moved by Murmulstein’s account, ending with interviewee and subject strolling off into the distance.  Lanzmann’s visual sense is as clean, crisp and unshowy as ever – his montages are precise, his images of modern towns giving an eerie sense of the Holocaust as an inescapable ghost in modern Europe.

When Shoah was released, Jean-Luc Godard criticised Lanzmann for his lack of interest in archive footage, arguing that it was fundamentally anti-cinematic.  It may be as a riposte that Lanzmann actually includes some archive material in The Last of the Unjust, albeit from a Nazi propaganda film showing suspiciously thin and weary-looking Jews supposedly enjoying their lives in Theresienstadt.  It is fascinating, but its truth value is obviously nil compared to Murmulstein’s spoken testimony.

Lanzmann knows the truth is a complex thing and seems to be warning viewers here to beware of trusting an image just because it’s old.  The scale of his Holocaust project is justified by how rich in context and information it becomes, and how – in this latest film – the familiar story of Nazi persecution of Jews can still throw up genuine moral challenges.

Thanks for reading our review of The Last of the Unjust

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