Shoah: Four Sisters Blu-ray Review
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, May 23, 2019
Claude Lanzmann's
Shoah is one of the undeniable monoliths of 20th century
documentary filmmaking, a harrowing set of interviews Lanzmann conducted with various survivors of the Holocaust, all told in a relatively
minimalist
style that probably only adds to the visceral impact of listening to the tragedies these people were forced to endure. As if the actual content of
Shoah
weren't devastating enough, Lanzmann had so much material at his disposal that the film ran for over nine hours, necessitating screenings to often
be split over subsequent days, with Part One showing on one day and then Part Two on the next in many markets (the film was
so long
each part had an intermission, at
least in some screenings). Perhaps amazingly, then, it has become apparent in the decades subsequent to the initial release of
Shoah
that
Lanzmann had considerably
more interview material in his archives, and what have been called "
Shoah satellite" pieces like
A Visitor From the Living started appearing in the late 1990s.
Shoah: Four Sisters is perhaps too strongly linked to its progenitor to even be termed a "satellite", since it follows in the same frightening
footsteps as the longer piece, giving voice to a quartet of women who managed to survive almost unimaginable horrors, all while quite young.
(One
of the interesting things about watching
Shoah: Four Sisters is seeing how relatively youthful these survivors, and indeed Lanzmann
himself, are in the film, since so many of us interested in the Holocaust or with survivors in our own families are used by now to only seeing rather
elderly people in this particular demographic.)
Each of the four women in this piece is granted a separate interview, and Lanzmann, as was his wont in the original
Shoah, can at times
be
somewhat provocative in his questioning. For example, in his interview with Ruth Elias, arguably the best known of the four interview subjects,
Elias talks
about her father's sausage making factory in the pre-War world, and Lanzmann kind of insouciantly asks if it was a kosher factory. (It wasn't).
Elias,
along with the other three women, is at times almost dissociatively calm in her recountings of truly horrifying experiences in various camps (I'm
not
going to get into much of the individual traumas these brave women endured, other than to say that in Elias' case, she was forced to make
something
akin to a
Sophie's Choice.) Lanzmann is a quietly
prodding force throughout all four interviews, quite often smoking in the background, but evincing some very moving and probably unavoidably
troubling anecdotes from the women.
What is so viscerally moving about all of the stories related is the intensity of hearing a first person account, often including supposedly mundane
things about otherwise epochal events that actually makes everything all the more "real". Some of the tales are just flat out weird (as opposed to
squirm inducing), with, for instance, Ada Lichtman surrounded by dolls in parts of her interview since she was tasked with "refurbishing" toys taken
from Jewish children in order to make them "useful" for German kids. It's just unsettling on any number of levels, and the acts of "testifying"
these women offer seem like very real, and very heroic, attempts to not just document what they went through, but to offer resistance, a very
palpable resistance, to any of the ideologies that were being exploited which led to the Holocaust. As such, one of the things that struck me
about all four of these women is how elegant and poised they were, even when there are occasional (understandable) emotional breakdowns.
With either Holocaust deniers or at least Holocaust "minimizers" still getting tons of bandwidth and/or media notice globally these days, these first
person accounts of Nazi atrocities in World War II become more than a mere history lesson: they are a testament to the truth of horrifying
personal experiences, experiences which instantly and to my mind irrefutably put the lie to anyone who would tend to trivialize what Jews and
other oppressed minorities went through in various camps. Needless to say, neither the original
Shoah nor this aggregation of four
stories is an "easy" watch, but it is perhaps more than ever a necessary one.
Shoah: Four Sisters Blu-ray, Video Quality
Shoah: Four Sisters is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Media Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1. I haven't been
able to track down much authoritative data on the technical side of things, but
Shoah was originally shot on 16mm, and at least some of this
presentation looks to have been sourced from the same smaller format. As such, detail and especially fine detail levels can vary pretty dramatically,
and there are some pretty noticeable generalized differences between some of the separately filmed interview sequences. For instance, the beachside
interview with Paula Biren has marginal clarity and detail levels at times (see screenshot 12 for one example), along with a slighly splotchy looking
grain field that isn't really in evidence in the other three "episodes". With an emphasis on close-ups, even with some variable clarity, certain fine
details like fabrics on chairs or dresses can look quite good. The palette is a bit faded looking at times, skewed slightly toward browns at various
moments. There is occasional minor but noticeable age related wear and tear, arguably most evident in the Elias interview, where a number of white
flecks appear with fair regularity, often around Elias' face or mouth.