The Location Outtakes for Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

In this chapter, I discuss what principles we might use to establish the aesthetic potential of unused film footage. In order to explore this question, I draw on the case study of the 30 hours of location footage in Claude Lanzmann’s archive of material excluded from his 1985 documentary Shoah, held at the USHMM in Washington DC but freely available to view online. The apparently unpromising nature of this unused material, with its focus on buildings and landscapes in Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Israel and the USA rather than individuals or their testimony, is emphasized by its absence from recent studies of the outtakes, and the fact that it was among the last of Lanzmann’s archive to be digitized. Since this footage is now available to view, this chapter analyses its significance in relation to the completed film, to the excluded interviews in the archive and to Lanzmann’s later releases. It also assesses the importance of this material in its own right, as footage that encodes a specifically spatial memory. In doing so, the chapter considers what role is taken by those features that characterise unedited footage, including its repeated takes, enigmatic framing and close-ups, and the absence of post-production sound, in the evaluation of what its significance might have been at the time of filming, and what it is now for the viewer in the present. It concludes by asking why some categories of non-fiction cinematic outtakes, including that of location film, seem harder to revisit and repurpose than others, such as interviews, in relation to some examples of the use of ‘found footage’ of this kind in work by Peter Beard, Chantal Akerman and Péter Forgács.