HOLOFICTION - DIE IKONOGRAFIE DES HOLOCAUST IM SPIELFILM
(The Iconography of the Holocaust in Feature Films)

Book edited by Marcus Stiglegger, 192 pages, Schüren Verlag, July 2026

Preface by Dominique Lanzmann

Michal Kosakowski and his wife Uli Aigner invited me to their home during the Berlinale 2025 to watch his film Holofiction, which, he told me, had been inspired by a sentence my husband Claude Lanzmann wrote in an op-ed in the newspaper Le Monde.

During the screening, my hands stayed clutched to the armrests of the chair and I held my breath for an hour and a half. Watching Holofiction is an extraordinary cinematic experience, which I will try to describe.

Through a lace-like montage of numerous short shots, some well known, some less so, grouped by theme and rendered silent, Michal Kosakowski gives the music the leading role as the narrative thread – a chronological succession of themes that Michal identified in the course of his titanic work of inventorying and classifying hundreds of films and scenes over eight years. The music is thus not simply added music; it was clearly written to Michal Kosakowski's images and montage, with which it becomes consubstantial.

The film opens in an atmosphere of preparations for an event; from the outset we are swept along by the overture of Paolo Marzocchi's symphonic score, in a bolero or tango rhythm, Felliniesque music à la Nino Rota that takes us from the gramophone needle and its horns to the loudspeakers of Nazi propaganda, only to shatter in a Bergian crash à la Lulu on the title Holofiction and Claude Lanzmann's words on the Shoah: "Fiction is a transgression; I deeply believe there is a prohibition on representation."

The first movement is Mahlerian. We travel through the streets and markets of the 1930s, the buses, the kitchens, sewing, ironing, laundry, children's games, merry-go-rounds, family life, family photographers, preparations for festive meals; an immense spectacle unfolds, relentlessly. Gradually unease sets in: bureaucracy, summonses, the "Jew" stamp, the swastika, the Star of David, the hiding place, the departure for the concentration camp – always at a breathless pace.

At the start of the second movement, at 30 minutes, to the sound of brass and contrabassoon, the Nazi machinery brutally sets itself in motion with its Nazi vehicles and motorcycles, its arrests, pursuits, escape attempts, round-ups at a run, people climbing into trucks, children lifted up, farewells and Orphic backward glances, departures in the wagons, overcrowding, rails, locomotives, braking, the ramp at Auschwitz, the ghettoization of cities, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, the ravine of Babi Yar, striped pyjamas, illness, death, resistance, weeping, children weeping, fear, terror, despair, watchtowers, barracks, roll calls. The music plays its part in forcing everything into line: absolute obedience, dehumanization, the fall – very beautiful music, in the style of Dvořák, with a Central European influence – forced labour at a run, starvation, death, crematorium ovens, trucks of ashes, ashes scattered.

Third movement, at around 1 hour: percussion, the taking of pictures, iconography, close-ups, ID photos, designation, selection, dogs, the hunt, humiliation, gymnastics, survival in the camps, the soup bowls, the bread, the cutting of hair, the real showers, Strauss waltzes, Nazi parties, toasts, torture, the death sentence; on a Mahlerian lied, absolute despair, covering one's head with ashes, pain, the shot in the back, the pouring of Zyklon through the openings in the roof, the connecting of the exhaust pipe of the gas vans. Wooden houses burning, chimneys with flames coming out of them – which, incidentally, is unreal but has been shown countless times in fiction films.

Fourth movement, at 1:18: twentieth-century musique concrète, à la John Cage, prepared pianos, screeching strings, the destruction of gramophones and black records, the death of musicians, the destruction of musical instruments, crowds heading towards the gas chamber building. Then the coda: hope, radio sets, clandestine listening to the radio, very realistic radio-wave music – and that is the end of Holofiction. During the end credits, which list the hundreds of films cited, the four movements of the score are recalled.

I have the greatest admiration for Michal Kosakowski. First, one had to have the idea and the motivation – and above all carry it out in such a perfect and masterful way, over eight years of work! The result is fascinating.

The demonstration is irrefutable: not only is fiction a transgression in the case of the Shoah, but, as Claude Lanzmann put it so well, "In reality, it didn't happen like that" and "A certain absolute of horror cannot be transmitted." On Schindler's List: "How can he say what the Holocaust was by telling the story of a German who saved 1,300 Jews, when the overwhelming majority of Jews were not saved?" "For Spielberg, in Schindler's List, the extermination is a backdrop." Later, Claude Lanzmann "made peace" with Spielberg at a Cannes Film Festival.

All in all, in Michal Kosakowski's film, with its faithful rendering of the scenes that recur most often in the hundreds of films about the Shoah, one is struck to discover a kind of central scotoma: all the films circle around the central subject without showing it – death in the gas chambers or gas vans, or death by shooting: the unrepresentable. The only, very rare allusions appear in the connecting of exhaust pipes in the gas vans in Ambulans (1962), Holocaust (1978), Operation Finale (2018), Amen. (2002), Lidice (2011) and The Photographer of Mauthausen (2018), or in an eye looking through a hole at what is happening in the gas chamber in Pasażerka (1963), Amen. (2002) and Walking with the Enemy (2013).

The rare films that show this allusive minimum were released before or after Shoah, it makes no difference. All one can say is that there is not only a prohibition on representation but, in reality, an impossibility of representation.

Another fascinating aspect of Michal Kosakowski's film is that we move from a scene in which an actor plays the Nazi to a similar scene in another film in which the same actor plays the Jew: Willem Dafoe is the commandant of Auschwitz in Adam Resurrected and the boxer Salamo Arouch in Triumph of the Spirit; Christoph Waltz is the Franciscan friar Maximilian Kolbe, who sacrifices himself for a father at Auschwitz, and SS Colonel Hans [Landa] in Inglourious Basterds; Ralph Fiennes is camp commandant Amon Göth in Schindler's List and Ignatz Sonnenschein in Sunshine; Klaus Kinski, the Nazi in Five for Hell, is also the American corporal in Deux salopards en enfer. It makes one dizzy. The actor's performance itself is called into question too. The roles are interchangeable; the Shoah is a backdrop. And one rereads Claude Lanzmann: "The deportees who were there, after months, years of misfortune, humiliation and misery, dying of fear – I cannot see them embodied by actors."

There is a problem of credibility – a clinical one – in the representation of inhumanity. As a doctor, after seeing Shoah for the first time, I found it hard afterwards to watch fiction films, any of them; I no longer believed in them.

So the hundreds of fiction films about the "Holocaust" have failed to show, or to make us understand, what the Shoah is. But Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah is there to make good this failure, this absence.

It is to be feared that some will nonetheless venture there by means of artificial intelligence, since whatever is possible will one day be done, and the prohibition may well be defied the day films are made entirely by artificial intelligence.

One must read the op-ed Claude Lanzmann wrote in Le Monde on 3 March 1994, published when Spielberg's Schindler's List was released, to fully understand the quotation Michal Kosakowski uses as an epigraph – "Fiction is a transgression; I deeply believe there is a prohibition on representation" – and one absolutely must see Holofiction, this UCO (unidentified cinematic object), which is its perfect demonstration.

Michal Kosakowski's masterpiece is a film one wants to see again and again, to take in its full scope, to listen once more to Paolo Marzocchi's masterly score, to play guessing games and pause on individual frames.

Dominique Lanzmann, 2026

“Everything, incidentally, revolves around Schindler's personal story: Schindler and the women, Schindler and sex, Schindler and money, Schindler as a kind of gambler. Fine, that is appealing; it has something of Raiders of the Lost Ark about it. So much so that when Schindler dines with German officers or SS men, they may come across as greedy, but in their handsome uniforms they are by no means unsympathetic. That is the whole problem of the image and of representation. Nothing that happened looked like that, even if everything appears authentic. The Germans were not like that. And I do not see how the deportees – after months and years of misery, humiliation, deprivation and mortal fear – can be portrayed by actors.

I am, in a sense, unable to justify my statement. Either you understand it – or you don't. It is a little like the Cartesian cogito: in the end you come up against a limit, a final knot, and you cannot go beyond it. The Holocaust is unique above all in that it erects around itself – in a circle of flames – a boundary that must not be crossed, because a certain absolute of horror cannot be transmitted: to attempt it nonetheless is to make oneself guilty of the gravest transgression.”

– Claude Lanzmann (Le Monde, 3 March 1994)