Placing the Location Outtakes of Shoah

This article considers how to read the location outtakes of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985). These film reels — now digitized and available on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website — often seem to offer little content, and demand different ways of viewing to make any sense of them. I link them to two other types of viewing experience: watching landscapes filmed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub and using online maps such as Google Street View to identify and navigate particular locations. Engaging with the outtakes in this way involves a consideration of the events of the Holocaust indexed by the locations and the images that Lanzmann made of them. It also makes it possible to glean something of the working methods of Lanzmann and his team. Finally, it offers a particular spatial experience in its own right, which, I argue, can serve as a form of Holocaust memorialization.