Film Screening:

Le dernier des injustes (The Last of the Unjust)

(Claude Lanzmann, 2013, 220 min, France, Austria, in German, French, and English with English subtitles, Color, Blu-Ray)

--Introduced by Prof. Shai Ginsburg (AMES)

--Q&A to follow with Shai Ginsburg and Pietro Bianchi (Romance Studies)

Returning to the Holocaust for the fourth time since his monumental 1985 documentary Shoah, 87-year-old Claude Lanzmann draws on unused footage of a 1975 interview in Rome with Viennese rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein to assess his role as the last, and sole surviving member of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt camp.  Murmelstein is a complex, controversial figure, tried for collaboration, and acquitted by a Prague court; Lanzmann presses him hard about his relationship with Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution.  Murmelstein contests political theorist Hannah Arendt's suggestion that Eichmann epitomized "the banality of evil"; remembering him as greedy, corrupt, and wicked.  In a brilliant dialogue with the film-maker, Murmelstein argues that, in order to protect his fellow Jews, he had to play the "calculating realist" with Eichmann.  Furthermore, Lanzmann makes telling use of a propaganda film that depicts Theresienstadt as a model camp, revisiting the site to convey the disturbing and thought-provoking impression of how life has returned to normal in a place where genocide was once plotted and carried out.

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Cost: Free and Open to the Public

Sponsors: The Center for French and Francophone Studies, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), and the Department of Romance Studies. Made possible by the FACE Foundation and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.