All I Had Was Nothingness director Guillaume Ribot tells Screen about opening a window into Claude Lanzmann’s filmmaking journey on Shoah.
French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann spent 12 years making Shoah, a nine-hour epic dissection of the Holocaust. It featured interviews with survivors, perpetrators and bystanders across several countries, and was first released in French cinemas in 1985. Forty years later, coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and what would have been Lanzmann’s 100th birthday, Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness has its world premiere today (February 17) in Berlin as a Special Screening.
The film retraces Lanzmann’s steps during the filming of Shoah between 1976 and 1981, using 220 hours of unreleased footage juxtaposed with Ribot’s voice reading Lanzmann’s own words. Ribot’s parallel journey was also years in the making. “Shoah showed me cinema,” says the French director, who started his career as a photographer. “I sketched every scene from the film on paper. I storyboarded all nine hours. It showed me how to make a film.”
Later, after Ribot had read Lanzmann’s 2011 memoir The Patagonian Hare and discovered the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) had the original rushes from Shoah available on its website, he decided to embark on the journey that led to All I Had Was Nothingness, which itself was three years in the making.
Ribot is not Jewish but has devoted much of his career to the Holocaust, starting with the 2014 documentary short Le Cahier De Susi, which explored his own family’s history of hiding Jewish children during the Second World War. It was followed by Treblinka (2016), The Black Book (2019) and Ukraine 1933: Seeds Of Hunger (2023). He has also explored the subject in photography exhibits and books.
Despite his longstanding interest in Shoah, Ribot never had the opportunity to meet Lanzmann before he died in 2018. “I think that’s a good thing, because I focused on just the director during a specific period working on one film, not what came before or after,” he says. “It’s not a biopic. I wasn’t interested in Lanzmann outside of the production of Shoah.”
All I Had Was Nothingness is produced by Estelle Fialon for Les Films du Poisson and Lanzmann’s widow Dominique Lanzmann for Les Films Aleph, in co-production with Arte France; mk2 Films, which also holds worldwide rights to Shoah among six of Lanzmann’s films, handles international sales.
Mammoth task
The footage, original outtakes of Shoah shot by Lanzmann and preserved by USHMM, was scanned in 4K from the original 16mm prints in Washington DC, then restored and colour-graded at Paris’s Traffic studio under Ribot’s guidance. He then downloaded all 220 hours. “I spent three months alone at home,” he says. “When something jumped out at me, I marked it. I knew where I was going with the film, but even in the end I wasn’t sure it would work.”
Ribot’s choice to open the film was a shot of Lanzmann driving his car to Treblinka extermination camp, while in the film’s final moments, Lanzmann puts his head on the chest of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising survivor Yitzhak Zuckerman, during a long embrace. “He tells him, ‘Claude, if you could lick my heart, it would poison you.’ That moment jumped out at me and made me want to make my film.”
However, adds Ribot, “Shoah is an interrogation. It forces us to ask questions. We’re not supposed to cry. I’ve never cried watching it. I’ve been shocked and awed, but it’s not a film designed for tears.”
Most of all, the director was focused on what was happening behind the images in the found footage. “I was intrigued by Lanzmann’s way of working,” he says. “It was fascinating to see him without a shirt in his hotel room when he puts on a hidden microphone to trap and record Nazis. In Shoah, we just see the van receiving sound and video — we don’t see how Lanzmann staged it all. These scenes show us how he created his cinema, how he presented these ‘characters’ almost like a work of fiction.”
The title of Ribot’s film alludes to a direct quote from Lanzmann at the start of the film: “I wanted to film, but all I had was nothingness.”
“We found the title just days before sending the film off to Berlin,” Ribot reveals. “We had everyone searching for the right words and we couldn’t land on them.” In the end, he says, “I love the word ‘nothingness’ in English. It is the perfect description of what Lanzmann did. It allows us to understand cinema — this idea that from nothingness, we can create a work of art.”
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