Grit vs. Death
Napalm (2017, 100'), Claude Lanzmann
‘It’s a masterpiece of character.’ — says the documentary film veteran, Marcel Ophüls, about Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s opus magnum, in Adam Benzine’s recent portrait film of the legendary French filmmaker. Lanzmann (1925–2018), who passed away just last month, has 10 directorial credits on IMDB, which makes him an averagely fertile réalisateur de documentaires. Considering that he was almost 50 years old when he started filmmaking, it is quite a feat. Napalm, which debuted in Cannes last year, is not even his last film and making documentary film over the age of 90 certainly requires some character.
The film starts with horrific archive images of the Korean War (1950–53) and culminates in Lanzmann’s personal account of his brief love affair with a local Red Cross nurse in Pyongyang while on his first visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1958 as a member of an international journalist delegation. Almost 60 years later, Lanzmann now travels back to the country seemingly with the sheer reason to re-evoke this one memory and lets himself be dragged through the usual propagandistic tours Westerners still get if they are allowed to enter North Korea.
Amongst shaky handheld images of old and brusque Lanzmann and his populous escort heading from one empty monumental site to another pretentious decoration of the dictatorship, we mostly see the director in a medium close-up, telling his story in front of the camera as if he was just reading it from his 2012 memoir, The Patagonian Hare. It is a gripping story spiced up with Lanzmann’s perhaps overripe manly charm, hoarse, laborious, but still well-articulated speech, which is quite audio-visual in itself — and also in lack of any kind of self-irony, not to mention humor.
Mostly fascinated by death in his most important works, Lanzmann is now talking about life and the possibility of love even if still amongst a lot of death and suffering. Life is what he is clinging to tighter than ever and not at all done with. His grit is underlined by the fact that he is not attempting to find the nurse or anyone from the past who he could confront and thus bring the film to a different level. No other point of view is offered, his dominance over the story is never at risk. What, nonetheless, remains there to be discovered for the viewer is a narrow line between strength of character and pure self-indulgence; and this is what can make Napalm and all its 100 minutes a worthwhile cinematic experience.
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