Witnessing after the Human: Post-Holocaust Landscapes of Ruination and Regeneration in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

Abstract

This essay explores potential implications of the nonhuman turn in memory studies via Claude Lanzmann's documentary, Shoah (1985), an enduring monument to the capacity for audiovisual affordances to facilitate oral history as it relates to collectivized trauma and atrocity originating during the Holocaust. I apply a new materialist approach to the film's editing, which excerpts interviews gathered in fourteen countries and interweaves these with location footage from former extermination sites whose landscapes bear witness both to past ruination and to ecological regeneration. The resulting montage, I argue, illustrates how witnessing “after the human” remains inherently relational, situated not only between filmmaker and human subjects but also between camera and environment in a broader actor network, testifying to the capacity for nonhuman modes of perception to bring these landscapes into focus in excess of what the naked human eye can see, effectively as lieux de mémoire plus-qu'humain.