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Show THE THUNDERBIRD MONDAY APRIL 27, 1987 PAGE 5 T iM: irap.HQ) tu-i- j I WELCOME USfilUSSR GYMNASTIC TEAMS! 'Shoah'.. .lest we forget as they can't "The Holocaust. ..is a wound that must never be allowed to heal and must be periodically torn open or the memories will become too easy to forget." Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. That old wound will bleed freely this week. Starting tonight, 7 and KBYU-1- 1 will air the cinematic paragon of our time. KUED at 7 p.m. and KBYU at 8 will begin a four-pa- rt airing of Claude hour masterpiece Shoah. Lanzman's nine In its long history of highminded programming that defies the current intellectual low tide in programming that pervades network television, the Public Broadcasting System has continued to provide alternative programming that has been unfailing in its quality. Shoah, however, exceeds even that high standard. Appropriately, movie analyst Roger Ebert called Shoah, "The movie of a lifetime." There has never been anything comparable to it, or its subject, so there is something flat about saying that Shoah is the finest movie ever. So say this! It is the most exemplary use to which cinema the technology, the technique has ever been put, ever. Shoah (The Hebrew word for annihilation) contains not a single segment from the 1 940s. It is an elicitation of memories of the Holocaust and proves that the unspeakable is not inexpressible. There is not a subject too large or lurid to be encompassed by words well chosen. And when words are joined with pictures that do not engender the subordination of words to visual values, even plain words are set like a diamond amid gold. In a time when movies fly out of Hollywood like chips of a poorly sawed piece of wood, (consider the pathetic drivel now playing in Cedar City) Shoah is brilliant because it is an act of cinematic modesty. It uses pictures usually of people plainly framed or landscape slowly panned as a sort of pictorial soundtrack behind the words. But as descriptive as even the most eloquent of words are the pauses, the flickering expression of facial muscles struggling for composure. The faces of the Holocaust are old now. The faces embody a frailty of life not only of the people filmed but of the memories they possess. Time races with them to share their memories with mankind and to fend off the receding tide of history. Shoah provides a historical record that will never fade from mind. There are moments of unmerciful illumination. The compelling deadpan of a former SS guard as he replies to a question about how many were killed in a particular place:"Four something forty thousand or four hundred thousand." Other moments convey a numbing power. An Israeli barber clips the hair of a customer as he describes his duties at Treblinka... cutting hair from naked women on the threshold of the gas chamber. The marr scarcely raises his voice above the famaliar ambiance of the clipping hair scissors as he describes how a fellow barber saw his wife and sister enter the room. The recurring image of the film is a train rumbling through a green pine forest to a death camp clearing just ahead. Even the clickety-clac- k of the train takes on a certain sinister, menacing air. An engineer, now ancient in years with a face the texture of elm bark, describes being plied with vodka so he could push to the unloading platforms the freight cars packed with Jews dying of thirst. One person, after seeing Shoah, wrote to Lanzman that it was the first time he had heard the cry of an infant in the gas chamber. He had not, of course. What he did hear was the quiet description by an Auschwitz survivor of the way bodies were jumbled when the gas chamber door opened, and what that jumble of flesh, vomit, excrement, and blood told about the final minutes in the dark when fathers lost their grips on their sons and the strong climbed over the weak as the gas fumes rose. Shoah presents a savagely enlightening insight into the most uncivilized creature in creation: man. With powerful simplicity, Shoah allows the audience to experience human suffering that has become a part of the commonality of our heritage as members of humankind and to be mindful of the Jewish ode: "Never.. .no never.. .again." The Nazi project was to erase the European Jews not just kill them but to erase traces of their existence. So the Nazis ground into dust the bones that would not burn and then threw the dust into lakes and rivers. Shoah, like Solhzhenitsyn's Gulag, is an act of continuing resistance to a continuing atrocity. Continuing? Yes, it is an assertion of memory against a program that will not be completed until memory fades and indifference reigns. A philosopher once said that Europe's massacred Jews, "...are not just part of the past, they are the present of absence." This week, when Shoah is seen, they will be present. EVERY THURS., FRI. AND SAT. HARDSHELL TfiCOS fiRE OH SALE FOR ONLY 29 C! KUED-- and-a-ha- lf DR, 0.F. RICH, OPTOMETRIST 60 NORTH MAIN 25 ON ALL SERVICES Specialty 1 DISCOUNT AND MATERIALS TO STUDENTS, Risk Free Contacts, FACULTY AND STAFF YEAR ROUND Money-Bac- k Guarantee qa3ain;cinri 7" 77.1 s' A SAVE SOME TIME FOR FUN! YOUR LAUNDRY DROP-OF- F eP WELL d''f -- AZ,. Y7L I 7 . :, , s DO IT FOR YOU! .BACHELOR BUNDLES ONLY $3.00 EACH ; vf; EXPIRES 54187 FULL SERVICE LAUNDROMAT 430 SOUTH MAIN STREET OPEN: 9:00 A.M. 9:00 P.M. WELC OME USAUSSR GYMNASTIC TEAMS! A LITTLE SHORT ON CASH i Get a 10 OFF on an Arbys Meal Deal with your student I.D.! rsA ! (C THE STARLIGHT CLUB SUSCS INNOVATIVE NIGHT CLUB PRESENTS THE GENERIC PARTY WITH SCOTT JONES STAY TUNED FOR DETAILS |