The Last of the Unjust
mrivers4

Review by mrivers4 Pro

The Last of the Unjust 2013

★★★★½

Watched 27 Dec 2023

I haven’t seen Lanzmann’s last film, but this is a late period film of an eminence akin to Kurosawa’s “Kagemusha” or Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon;” not merely echoes of their previous work, but emotional expansions, mature artists more outwardly reckoning with their thematic and philosophical obsessions.

As a documentary subject, Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the only so called Jewish Elder of Eichmann’s “model ghetto” to survive the war, will exhaust all your moral and intellectual facilities, and remind you that genocide is not only about the destruction of one reality but the creation of another. But I am perhaps most struck by Lanznmann’s physical presence in the film — not only in the ‘70s-set interviews with Murmelstein, but in the present day, walking the grounds once used for debasement and death, visiting the sole Jewish synagogue left standing in Vienna (the preoccupation with what remains from catastrophe feels even more urgent here than in “Shoah”). Add to that the many resonances of Lanzmann in the present day providing explanations and testimonials that add historical context to his increasingly more probing interrogations of Murmelstein in the past. I am reminded more than ever that the documentarian is a part of his work, his POV essential to its design and to its effect. As his work has shaped our understanding of the holocaust, he too has been shaped by his journey excavating the past, which lives on in the present, and will never die.

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