All I Had Was Nothingness review: ‘you will never see a more haunting road movie’

Most of you will have heard of the film Shoah. Some of you will have watched the epic documentary that is over nine hours long. But maybe fewer of you will know about the lengths director Claude Lanzmann went to to create his monumental documentary about the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.

Until now. Premiering this week at the Berlin Film Festival, in the Berlinale Special strand, All I Had Was Nothingness dives headfirst into the process of making the film, into Lanzmann’s six years of non-stop filming of first-person testimonies by survivors, witnesses and, crucially, perpetrators.

Released in 1985, Shoah was immediately hailed as a landmark, once-in-a-lifetime work, winning a BAFTA for Best Documentary. In 2022, it was voted the 27^th greatest film of all time in the British Film Institute’s magazine’s Sight and Sound’s decennial poll.  The following year, Shoah was added to the Unesco Memory of the World Register.

Filmmaker Guillaume Ribot[Missing Credit]

So, no, this is not a film that’s been forgotten, nor should it ever be. But it has been seven years since Lanzmann passed away, aged 92.

Now All I Had Was Nothingness brings Lanzmann back, courtesy of French filmmaker Guillaume Ribot, a former journalist and photographer who has written extensively about the Holocaust. Working alongside Lanzmann’s widow, Dominique, who takes a credit as a producer, Ribot has been granted privileged access to Lanzmann’s archives. All I Had Was Nothingness is entirely culled from never-before-seen outtakes from Lanzmann’s filming, some 220 hours of unreleased footage.

Knitting it all together are Lanzmann’s own words, as he reflects on the journey to make Shoah, with this narration spoken by Ribot himself (all taken from Lanzmann’s own 2009 memoir The Patagonian Hare). Surely future DVD box-sets of Shoah will be packaged with Ribot’s documentary, for it makes the perfect companion piece. And yet this is so much more than a mere ‘making of’; it’s a film that’s digs inside Lanzmann’s soul, one that became increasingly tormented by the stories he hears from Holocaust survivors.

This film digs inside Lanzmann’s soul

Like the most haunting road movie you could ever see, early on the camera is trained on Lanzmann in his car. “All I had was nothingness,” he says of his Herculean task of tracking down witnesses to the genocide. Lanzmann recounts how the mission to make the film started in Israel, and later – when funding dried up – how he had forced to go to fundraisers who would question his reasons for making such a movie. 

Perhaps the real juice of Ribot’s film comes in the scenes where Lanzmann and his assistant track down those complicit in the murder. Initially stonewalled in his attempts, he decides to fake an identity, and films perpetrators with a primitive hidden camera, which was beaming footage back to a van hidden in a nearby street. From clashes with neighbours (one couple appear blithely unconcerned that someone they live near drove gas-trucks in the war) to the moment where Lanzmann’s undercover operation is uncovered, it is horribly gripping.

Later, emotions are stirred when Lanzmann goes to Poland, a country he admits he initially avoided visiting for fear of what he may find. There, he meets local farmers who witnessed atrocities and is left devastated by a visit to the extermination camp near Treblinka, and the innocuous, quiet town close by. By the end, you’ll feel like you’ve been on Lanzmann’s odyssey with him – and perhaps able to re-watch, or see for the first time, his film Shoah.

All I Had Was Nothingness

★★★★