‘SHOAH’ TO AIR ON PBS : LANZMANN RELIVES THE HOLOCAUST

Claude Lanzmann did not initially want “Shoah,” his epic-length film about the Holocaust, shown on television.

“Two years ago, I would have preferred having the film seen in theaters, on a big screen, with many people gathered together to see it, but I have changed my mind,” explained Lanzmann, a French journalist-turned-film maker whose critically acclaimed film begins a four-night run on the Public Broadcasting Service tonight.

“The reports I’ve had from (television viewers in Europe) show that seeing the film alone and in solitude has not in any way lessoned the impact,” he said.

In fact, experiencing the film on television may intensify the impact, Lanzmann said. He noted that the film’s premiere engagement in Berlin theaters had produced an outpouring of public praise, but the subsequent broadcast on German TV resulted in many letters of “anti-Semitic protest” from viewers.

The 9 1/2-hour film, which took Lanzmann 11 years to make, originally was released in the United States late in 1985 and since has been made available on videocassette at a suggested retail price of about $300. But the public television presentation (tonight at 8 on Channels 28, 15 and 24, and at 9 on Channel 15) provides the greatest potential audience for the film to date.

“My hope is that most people will see this film, and see it twice . . . and that it will live forever,” Lanzmann said.

Lanzmann was here last week from his home in Paris to meet with a small group of journalists at WNET, the station that has packaged and presented the film for American public television. A strong-willed yet soft-spoken man, Lanzmann set a ground rule that he would respond only to questions from reporters who had seen the entire film.

He spoke frankly of his dissatisfaction with past treatments of the Holocaust on television, even in documentaries. “ ‘Shoah’ is not a documentary,” he insisted.

“You cannot represent the Holocaust; it is the absence of images you must try to show. . . . This was the challenge of ‘Shoah,’ ” he said.

“There are no pictures of the actual exterminations, of what took place in the gas chambers,” he continued, alluding to the archival and newsreel footage of concentration camps activities, skeletal bodies and the eventual liberation of the camps that usually are incorporated in films focusing on the Holocaust. “I think it’s a grave transgression to try to represent these things.”

Trying to re-create them in dramatic films--such as NBC’s 1978 miniseries “Holocaust”--isn’t any better, he suggested. “They usually show the victims nobly entering the gas chambers, and this isn’t the way it was at all. . . . In a way, I think it’s obscene to make fiction out of thousands upon thousands of people dying in gas chambers.”

His film, consisting solely of contemporary footage and on-camera interviews with survivors, observers and even former Nazi participants of the Holocaust, was an attempt to “relive” rather than to re-create events, he said.

Lanzmann was asked about the tactics he employed in the course of shooting 350 hours of interviews for the movie, including the surreptitious filming of a former Nazi officer at the Polish camp Treblinka.

“I am not a journalist now,” he answered, “and I don’t have to follow (journalistic) rules and ethics. . . . I have made my own rules and ethics.”