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Anna Hajkova deposited The Last of the Self-Righteous: Claude Lanzmann’s version of Benjamin Murmelstein on Humanities Commons 8 years, 10 months ago
There is a wealth of problems with Claude Lanzmann’s recent film The Last of the Unjust, on Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Elder of the Jews of Theresienstadt. Yet the most aggravating of them is that it portrays Murmelstein as someone who he was not, namely as a heroic figure. In styling Murmelstein as a tragic hero, Lanzmann projects his own personality, as he would like to be seen himself, onto his material. This is quite problematic, historically but also as a film.