When reading Claude Lanzmann’s 2009 memoir The Patagonian Hare, director Guillaume Ribot was struck by insights into making the monumental Shoah. The book recounts the making of Shoah in four of its chapters, presenting Lanzmann’s own detective work finding perpetrators and witnesses and interviewing them. Maybe it was the investigative element of this method that initially drew Ribot to consider telling a sort of behind-the-scenes story, but what makes a perfect companion piece out of All I Had Was Nothingness is the way it surrenders to asking the most difficult questions in the deafening silence: the “why” of the Holocaust is hauntingly present.
Ribot, whose background is in photography and Holocaust memory, narrates the film using Lanzmann’s own words layered over archival footage unused in the final nine-hour cut of Shoah. A total of 220 hours of rushes were kept in the United States Holocaust Museum (online even), of which Ribot gleaned fragments to assemble what is, if not a road movie, then a movie on the road: a meandering, self-reflexive documentation of Lanzmann’s own doubts and aspirations for the 12 years it took to make the definitive film about the Holocaust.
All I Had Was Nothingness finds its own storytelling rhythm without necessarily making a structural point about it: some scenes are cut short until we return to them later, for example. While Ribot is almost completely absent (voice notwithstanding), Lanzmann is there in every shot. There are short, B-roll scenes of the director smoking in silence, sequences that capture landscapes of his journey (be it Poland or New York) with sunrises, sunsets, and parks to give the viewer some breathing room before the next interview takes place. The documentarian-detective mode herein includes Lanzmann’s struggles to finance his film and accounts of endeavors to raise more money for it.
Shoah is often discussed as a landmark of cinema. While it certainly is that, Ribot’s film also brings attention to Lanzmann’s sustained effort to document Holocaust oral histories. All I Had Was Nothingness paints him as a researcher driven by ethical and moral conundrums, as well as an empathetic man whose ability to converse honestly made the film what it is today. In one scene, Lanzmann and his small crew get caught in the act, presenting as historians and recording video without permission; another time, the camera zooms in during a heavy emotional revelation to show Lanzmann placing a hand on that of his interviewee.
“Shoah is the abolition of the distance between past and present,” Lanzmann’s words echo at the end of the film. The same is true about trauma; it’s not a “thing” but rather an embodied chronotope. A body remembers, and in trauma it regresses to an earlier time and place where it first occurred. These observations are not clearly stated in All I Had Was Nothingness and only for the better: Lanzmann’s perceptive understanding of how important talking was to victims and witnesses informed his directorial decisions to stage scenes or occasionally reenact events. All this footage oozes with pain and everything about its making keeps All I Had Was Nothingness at a safe distance from any negative criticism. The film is a homage to Lanzmann’s work with the purest intentions, but hopefully it will see longer life than being programmed at the Berlinale as a token of German self-flagellation. Within the context of present-day German politics and stringent rules around what the government deems permissible to say or not with regards to Israel and Gaza, the kind of bravery Lanzmann exhibits should not be restricted to a Holocaust of the past.
All I Had Was Nothingness premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.