Un vivant qui passe

Concerns less the banality than the theatricality of evil, and the way that, decades later, it continues to operate on someone lacking the imagination to see past it. Also, a lesson in the complexity of interpretation required to understand any single historical document. Cinematically, the filmmaker's unadorned style insists that all that matters is the content, whether by that is meant the facts he recites or the expressiveness or inexpressiveness of his interviewee's voice or face.

Lanzmann's patient and spot-on questioning seems to lead to a chilling speculation: the targeted recipients of the deceptive theatre of evil are not just the dumb or the ignorant, but also (and maybe even more) those that are somehow not truly against the evil yet need to have their guilt removed.

I consider this a continuation of 'Shoah' and so rate the film accordingly. The deception of war is exemplified here in the form of Theresienstadt Ghetto as Lanzmann makes use of historical documents to confront Maurice Rossel (a WWII ICRC official) with the true horror of this extermination camp. Rossel's honesty is highly admirable but his fixation on judging the Jews of the Theresienstadt Ghetto as 'passive', even in hindsight, is disturbing.