Brief encounter | 22 June 2017

How do you follow a film like Shoah? The nine-hour Holocaust documentary, released in 1985 after 11 years of work and 350 hours of interviews — with survivors and perpetrators, saviours and collaborators, historians and bystanders — is considered one of the greatest films ever made. For decades, director Claude Lanzmann kept returning to the subject, raking over the same material, finding it impossible, maybe indecent, to move on. Of the five documentaries he has made since Shoah, four were substantial footnotes to the original, extended — and often extraordinary — out-takes from the acres of unused footage.

But Lanzmann did have an answer to the question of what to do next — even though it sounded like a joke. When he travelled to Pyongyang two years ago with a skeleton crew, the film he proposed was a documentary about the North Korean passion for tae kwon do. The pitch was, it turns out, a ruse. ‘I couldn’t say what the film I wanted to make was about, or what I wanted to shoot, otherwise the North Koreans would never have let me make it,’ Lanzmann says.

The film he actually made is Napalm, a documentary that harks back to 1958 when the 91-year-old director visited North Korea for the first time as part of a French delegation. When Lanzmann was in Pyongyang, he fell madly in love with a North Korean nurse, Kim Kum-sun, who had been tasked with injecting restorative vitamins into his bottom. It was a charged affair, and is recounted with intensity, though it remained unconsummated. The encounter has stayed with Lanzmann ever since, taking up a chapter in his picaresque autobiography The Patagonian Hare, which was published in English in 2012.

So why did Lanzmann feel the need to make a film? ‘Not everyone has read the book,’ the Frenchman harrumphs.