THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
On July 5, 2018, Claude Lanzmann died in Paris, at the age of 98. The author of Holocaust (1985) and a few other dazzling masterpieces taken from the rushes of this monumental essay had nevertheless shot, shortly before his death, a strange film, even though it too was caressed by the wing of Lanzmann’s “madness”, entitled Napalm (2017). Either the filming of an intimate memory, already mentioned in his autobiography, The Patagonian Hare (Gallimard, 2009). It is a brief but unalterable love affair, experienced in 1958 with a young woman from Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, when the filmmaker was making his first Western visit there among a delegation of French intellectuals working alongside of communism.
Was it necessary that this passion was strong so that, almost sixty years after his conflagration, Lanzmann devoted the entirety of his film to it, without finding it worthwhile to go back even a little on the reasons for this trip, on the enthusiasm that s he expressed for one of the worst dictatorships in the world, nor even on the trade he maintained there with his traveling companions, among whom none less than Chris Marker or Armand Gatti. Nothing.
On the other hand, at the sight and in contact with the nurse Kim Kun-sun was born an irrepressible desire to give way to the delegation as well as to the officials who supervised her firmly to make her chain the inaugurations of chrysanthemums. What was done in good and due form, at the risk and peril of lovers of a day, as the subject of the love at first sight returned to the place at 90 tells in person, with astounding emotion.
The game of truth
In a nutshell, a terrific film, but also quite wobbly, the story of the passion for love being essentially recorded in an office in Paris, so that Lanzmann’s return to North Korea, where his political analyzes of this country arouse the skepticism, performs less well there than it should. However, François Margolin, who was the producer of Napalm, looks back today on this stay, where he accompanied him and of which he produced unpublished views. He also enlightens us, incidentally, on the reasons for the difficulties at the time, with the thousand and one impediments to filming caused by the official surveillance of the team and a more mocking Lanzmann than it seems. He offers us, more essentially, the ultimate portrait of the great man still alive.
Claude Lanzmann appears here as an old man above ground who one wonders if he is still aware of being filmed
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