The Voice of the Narrator

Felman points out that the voicelessness of the narrator and the voice of the inquirer produce a question in the very answer, and enact a difference (Felman 1992: 207).

However, it is not quite true to say the narrator is ‘voiceless’ as Lanzmann’s presence, or the presence of his voice, is very clear in the film, through his questioning which always points to the way his inquiry is structured. In other words, there is no formal commentary but there is in fact a commentary which is more than just a narration – it is a statement, a creation of a new awareness, it is a break with what was known previously and with the way some questions maybe have to be asked and some decisions made how to answer them. This is the space in which the ethics of the scene, the film and the whole project of interviewing the other for a film are played out. Despite Felman’s beautiful language, it is not a given that the sheer enterprise of gathering testimony for posterity makes it ethical. Susana de Sousa Dias’s choice was to take her voice completely out of the text she had created; she felt that her presence in the film would take away from the experience of ‘being in one’ with the suffering of her witnesses. However, whilst I respect her position and her film one could also argue that that position completely disempowered the spectator, who has no chance of being

‘emancipated’. In addition, with all the questions cut out, the text appears autobiographical and it is not.

Mladen Dolar in his groundbreaking ‘A Voice and Nothing More’ (2006) offers a number of ways of thinking about the Voice, which might be highly relevant to documentary studies. He evokes Badiou’s (in Dolar 2006: 59)

‘there are only bodies and languages’ which Dolar sees as a continuation of

‘illustrious predecessors: let us say, of Descartes’s division into res extens and res cogitans, where both parts have undergone considerable change: (…) a cyber body, a body without organs, a body as life force and production (…) and thought has evolved from the soul and ideas to the multiplicity of signs and languages (…) instead of body and soul, multiple pleasures and signs’.

Dolar talks about: ‘incorporeal bodies’ suspended, ‘between nothing and the pure event’. He mentions truths that ‘present a break in the world of what exists, a rupture of continuities of bodies and languages’ (…) Now the voice as the object, the paradoxical creature that we are after, is also a break (ibid.:

60).

A documentary is perhaps this kind of ‘incorporeal body’, consisting of people’s speeches and images, emotions and intellect, suspended between art/fiction and some form of representation of reality. If it works at all, it is an event. Dolar connects ‘the event’, the rupture – to the voice, which gives it a name: ‘The body implied by the voice, disembodied as it may seem, is enough to be cumbersome and embarrassing: in all its living presence it is also like the corpse one cannot dispose of’ (ibid.: 60).

Dolar evokes Michel Chion’s idea of the acousmatic voice (1982), a voice whose source one cannot know or see. In a documentary the disembodied acousmatic voice often has a clear source even when we cannot see the speaker – in the Bomba scene it is the film’s powerful director, Lanzmann – we hear him, we do not see him. Nonetheless, his visual bodily absence in that scene lifts him above an ordinary intersubjective encounter and my suggestion is that Lanzmann presents the scene exactly the way he wants it; his disembodied voice is the voice of the Master. He somehow has the right – clearly in his view and that of Felman and her supporters, he has the right to break the silence of the other – because the testimony is called for. However, the fact is that Bomba has already given his testimony up to that point – we know already enough, surely?

Dolar elaborates on the power of the disembodied voice. Apparently Pythagoras’s disciples had to follow their Master for five years, listening to his voice from

behind the curtain and not seeing him for that very reason (Dolar 2006: 61). ‘The point of the device’, he says, ‘was to ultimately separate the spirit from the body.’

The voice itself acquired authority and surplus-meaning by virtue of the fact that its bodily source was concealed: it seems to become ‘omnipresent and omnipotent’ (ibid.: 61-62).

Returning to Shoah, LaCapra again is highly critical of Lanzmann’s use of his interviewing technique also because of this disembodied voice leading indeed towards a semi-religious admiration amongst some viewers; in his view Lanzmann is not just ruthless, he is narcissistic and somehow seems to evoke unhealthy idealization among some viewers and writers. LaCapra glosses:

‘Responses to Claude Lanzmann as figured in his film Shoah are at times imbued with the kind of awe that might be evoked by a prophet or even a saint bearing stigmata’ (ibid.: LaCapra 2004: 151).

LaCapra has not been alone in feeling uncomfortable over the Bomba episode – there have been hundreds of papers criticizing the filmmaker’s position in the scene. A veteran documentary film scholar Brian Winston (2012), for example very recently voices his utter disdain for Lanzmann’s methods, giving as an example, again, the Abraham Bomba scene. He calls Lanzmann ‘egregious, reprehensible and obscene’: ‘Lanzmann’s “You have to…” is a blatant and outrageous lie. It is the last thing the man has to do’ (Winston in Ten Brink 2012:

97–119, in press, page numbers provisional).

LaCapra, who is almost a spokesperson for those who attack Lanzmann, straightforwardly condemns the film, which he sees as deeply unethical, with the Bomba scene encapsulating the issues of the film as a whole as Shoah for LaCapra is ‘neither representational nor autonomous art but as disturbingly mixed generic performance that traces and tracks the traumatic effects of limit-experiences’(LaCapra 1998: 100). He also accuses Lanzmann of ‘acting out through the film’, ruthlessly exploiting the subjects of the film for his own purposes, verging on the sadistic (ibid.: 100-101).

LaCapra calls instead for ‘harmonizing, normalizing’ ways of interviewing the witnesses of trauma, in a way, which resonates with Laub.

This is where it all gets impossibly complicated: Lanzmann’s determination, his desire, to carry on with the project despite a mountain of practical difficulties, including major funding difficulties, was clearly a huge task. It is very doubtful whether ‘a harmonizing, normalizing’ person could achieve what Lanzmann did.

Do we as spectators simply have to accept that a certain amount of violence experienced by the subject of the film is simply part of the package? This may well be so. What I think is particularly difficult to accept is Felman’s notion that somehow prevailing on the witnesses to speak is good for them.