Notes on Godard/Lanzmann

I have been rather perplexed by Godard and Lanzmann's famous debate, (of which a slightly reductive account can be found here).

Both filmmakers agree that it is the cinema's duty to bear witness. Unlike the simultaneous non-images of television, cinema's responsibility is to absorb the trauma of the incident and (perhaps not re-produce or re-present) but inflect the change that has taken place.

Godard's dismissal of Shoah might have been missing the point - history is not only contained in images, but also in people. But people, like images, can also lie.

My worry, on the other hand, is for a generation that no longer experiences the Holocaust as presently as the previous one, a generation for whom the Holocaust would be nothing but myth. In that case, the image's power to indict and to record the real remains paramount. And yet, Lanzmann's 'fictions of the real' and 'silences of images' cannot be overlooked.