‘All I Had Was Nothingness’ Director on the Despair That Haunted ‘Shoah’ Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann

variety.com:

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps; it is also the 40th anniversary of the release of “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s groundbreaking film that redefined how the Holocaust was viewed.

On Monday, documentary “All I Had Was Nothingness,” which looks at the making of “Shoah,” has its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.

Variety spoke to its director, Guillaume Ribot. “All I Had Was Nothingness” is based on Lanzmann’s memoir “The Patagonian Hare” – which, read by Ribot himself, provides the voiceover to the film – and utilizes footage taken from 220 hours of outtakes from “Shoah.” The memoir gave Ribot “the possibility of seeing the train of thoughts of [Lanzmann] and the ingredients that he needed in order to make such an opus, which is his determination and courage,” he says.

The challenge for Lanzmann, Ribot explains, was that most of the camps had been obliterated. “There’s nothing there but ruins and barbed wire,” Ribot says, adding that you can’t understand what happened at the camps just by going to where they once stood.