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On the Boardwalk • 6879 Orchard Lake Rd. • West Bloomfield
78
April 25 • 2013
JN
7
0
FI E
PLC
Marian Marzynski turns the camera
on himself in Never Forget to Lie.
George Robinson
Special to the Jewish News
I
n 1996, Marian Marzynski wrote
and directed a remarkable docu-
mentary, Shtetl, a three-hour-long
film about his visit with a close American
friend to the Polish village in which the
friend's parents were born.
It was one of the few films about the
murder of Polish Jews in World War II
that took up the challenge tacitly offered
by Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: to try to
find a form for a contemporary docu-
mentary appropriate to that uniquely
terrible subject.
Picking up clues from Lanzmann's
practice, Marzynski, himself a survivor
and hidden child, wove an intricate
tapestry of recollections, interviews,
landscape and old photo albums; in
doing so, he evoked the lost, brutal past
without attempting to recapture it arti-
ficially as so many previous films about
the Holocaust had done.
Now 75, the Emmy-winning director
has reached a point where he feels ready
to "turn the camera on myself:' and the
result is a more modest offering. At a
mere 55 minutes, it doesn't have the scale
of Shtetl, but it is no way less significant
or less powerful. Never Forget to Lie is a
somber, brooding, occasionally melan-
choly film, almost in spite of its creator's
seemingly sunny personality. Of course,
that is to be expected.
With the events of the war and the
Shoah receding in the past, the only liv-
ing witnesses left to the crimes of the
Nazis are those who, like Marzynski,
were children when they were victims.
The trigger for his latest return to
Poland, and the armature on which the
film is erected, is an annual gathering
of Holocaust children in Warsaw. The
filmmaker takes the opportunity both
to visit locations from his own child-
hood and to escort other survivors on a
series of similar excursions.
Thus, while he shares with viewers
some of the details of his own experi-
ences, he still manages to play his cards
very close to the vest. Indeed, the only
footage in which we see Marzynski
overcome with emotion is in material
he shot 30 years ago on an earlier film-
making trip to Poland.
It is a startling contrast with many of
his interview subjects, who frequently
revert to the childhoods of which they
were robbed, with outbursts of sobbing
that threaten never to end. Therein
lies one source of the power of the
Lanzmann-influenced documentaries on
this subject; rather than try to recapture
the past, to film what is no longer visible,
filmmakers like Marzynski have created
an entire school that documents the
absence itself.
The reactions of the surviving, scat-
tered remnant, the meager documenta-
tion of what was destroyed, the land-
scapes whose scars have been occluded,
all but erased, by new grass — these are
the manifestations of absence that have
become central to the best Holocaust
documentaries of the past 30 years.
By its comparatively modest nature,
Never Forget to Lie probably doesn't
reach those heights, although there is
no gainsaying the emotional impact of
much of the testimony recorded in the
film. But as a miniature of great skill,
passion and compassion, it is an admi-
rable achievement.
❑
Never Forget to Lie will be shown
on the PBS series Frontline
nationwide on Tuesday, April
30, at 10 p.m., when it also is
scheduled to be shown on Detroit
Public Television-Channel 56.1.