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Filming History
Claude Lanzmann shot his landmark Shoah (1985) over the course of more than a decade. William Lubtchansky was the primary cinematographer and Caroline Champetier assisted for several years, eventually becoming Lanzmann's director of photography on subsequent projects. Lanzmann often includes resonant landscape shots, but the true power of his films derives from the gestures, voices, and faces of the people giving testimony.
This is especially true of Jan Karski, the aristocratic Polish courier who volunteered to go into German transit camps to report information to Poland's government-in-exile in London and to President Roosevelt. His remarks are among the most memorable part of Shoah, and Lanzmann later took the footage Lubtchansky and Champetier had shot of Karski and created a separate film (The Karski Report, 2010, below). The juxtaposition of Karski's verbal precision and his expressive gestures created great practical challenges for both cinematographers (who use a zoom lens to try to keep up with the physicality of the subject), but the result is uniquely compelling.
In 2001, Champetier shot a film about another notoriously unrepresentable subject: the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. As the first sequence below makes clear, director Nobuhiro Suwa took on the subject by attempting to respond to both the extant documentary material and to Alain Resnais's memory film Hiroshima mon amour (1959).
Champetier created some of the deepest, most voluptuous blacks of her career in the film. These are set in stark relief to the historical footage at the end of the first extract below and they are movingly connected, on multiple levels, to the act of filming and the challenges of visual perception in the second.
History in Motion
1981 saw the release of two trenchant films shot by Lubchansky and Champetier - Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Too Early, Too Late and Jacques Rivette's Le Pont du nord. The latter was Rivette's full-fledged return to contemporary France after a full decade in the realm of the fantastic. Characters read newspaper stories about the suicide or murder of ministers and contemporary political scandals, and the film treats all of these events as part of a secret history of the French capital.
In the film, Rivette systematically alternates between images of buildings under construction and shots of iconic statues, like the bronze replica of The Lion of Belfort (Frédéric Bartholdi, 1880) in the Place Denfert-Rochereau – a symbol of French Resistance and an important site of May 1968 protests that also marks the entrance to the Catacombs – highlighting them in a way that invites comparison with the work of Straub and Huillet.
Straub and Huillet frequently combine formal concentration with a focus on the particular histories and structures of major cities, using extremely long shots that roam through a location as a way of interrogating the compression of historical forces that it embodies or represents, as in the circular movement at the Place de la Bastille in Too Early, Too Late (accompanied by the reading of a text from Friedrich Engels). The deliberate solidity of buildings and statuary, as artistic manifestations of cultural moments, is framed statically and set off against the constant motion of cars and other vehicles.
In Le Pont du nord, by contrast, the camera moves in circles around the statues, which function less as historical palimpsests than as mythic guardians, symbols of the clandestine interactions that influence modern life from behind the scenes.
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Ryūsuke Hamaguchi
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Andrzej Wajda
