Critics reviews

Lanzmann's film is not restricted to confrontation. His ambition is to make a film, an intriguing work of art, and this means that the discussed facts are only building blocks toward the whole. His deeper concept is more ambitious.

Much of the interview is given over to semantic debate, but Lanzmann just as sagely allows his images to accrue an existential gravitas, formulating at once an inquiry into the capacity of our moral constitution and an aesthetic hypothesis for the dimensions of memory itself. As such, Lanzmann's cinema remains less document than testament, one of immense power and integrity — a legacy of legacies.

The belated release of this material is fascinating, not only for its own sake but also for the way in which the film's last scene develops strategies that prefigure those the filmmaker would use in several of the most important episodes of his celebrated work.

As in Shoah, Lanzmann organizes the material achronologically, presenting Murmelstein's narrative out of order and intercutting it with footage of Theresienstadt shot in 2012; this complex structure evokes a sense of moral vertigo that's nearly impossible to shake.

[Lanzmann is] a masterful interviewer, drawing out a torrent of memories and detailed accounts from an incredibly verbal Murmelstein, who seems to be at peace with his actions. Lanzmann's newly shot material, showing him walking through the ruins of Theresienstadt, brings more ghosts to life, completing his "Shoah" epic in this confrontation with the ultimate moral gray zone.

...Lanzmann employs two sets of illuminating, and indeed quite amazing, visual aids. One is a group of drawings of the camp's daily life—including carts hauling corpses and wraith-like humans straggling along the streets—that were created by expert artist-residents and hidden from the Nazis... The other visuals belong to a Nazi propaganda film shot at Thereisenstadt during the war showing its residents, well-dressed [...and] going about their ostensibly wholesome daily routines...

When one listens to you [Murmelstein], one doesn't get the feeling that misfortune reigned" at Theriesenstadt — that the dominant impression is that "you feel nothing..." It's a surprising accusation from a filmmaker so unsentimentally obsessed with details rather than feelings, the better to assemble a total picture of atrocity that requires no emotional undercurrent — an insulting prerequisite, frankly, assuming genocide isn't absorbing without "someone to relate to.

The film is fundamentally a dialogue founded on mutual admiration, a quality Lanzmann foregrounds in the movie's closing minutes. The Last Of The Unjust is demanding but fascinating, both as history and as an intellectual volley on the lure of power, the ambiguities of perspective, and the difficulty of claiming moral high ground in a context where matters of life and death are so precarious.

To some extent the film is a thundering riposte to Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Arendt depicted Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who Murmelstein calls "a demon," as a mere bureaucrat, and men like Murmelstein as highly culpable themselves. Lanzmann, for his part, begins the interview with a sharp, probing manner; by the end, the filmmaker's questions and body language are conveying something altogether different.

There's a monotonous sameness to the 1970s interviews, to the point where they begin to resemble a deposition rather than a testimonial. The film's most compelling footage was shot recently, with Lanzmann himself, now elderly, standing in the modern-day locations where events or interviews took place decades earlier; there's a poetic melancholy to shots of ordinary commuter trains trundling along tracks that once carried thousands of Jews to the ghetto.

[Lanzmann] figures as much more of a physical presence [in The Last of the Unjust]; the images we're likeliest to carry away are of his own squat and stocky body, not those of Murmelstein. And if this seems at times oddly skewed, Lanzmann also convinces us it is unavoidable, because in effect he is the only witness left. Indeed, the strongest common thread between Shoah and this film is himself as existential witness.

The Murmelstein sessions are now the basis of Lanzmann's mesmerizing, three-and-a-half-hour The Last of the Unjust, and you can see why they merit a film of their own. Murmelstein's complex, troubling case casts particular light on what Lanzmann's introductory text calls a "capital, both lateral and central" aspect of the Holocaust: the so-called "model ghetto"—in reality a concentration camp with a facade of horrifying duplicity—named Terezin, or in its German name, Theresienstadt.