How to say things without saying them, in order to be understood by everyone? How can we express the horror and the complexity of choice in the face of horror? What path should we follow to tell the past, in color or in black and white, with depth and sometimes humor, or even with drawings? What is The Most Valuable of Goods ? Michel Hazanavicius, director, screenwriter and producer… and crazy about history!
Once upon a time there was a train…
A snowy forest in Poland, the cold of winter, the muffled sounds of the footsteps of a “poor woodcutter” who collects wood. Suddenly a cry, that of a train – god or demon – carrying death on rails. And a second cry, that of life, that of a baby thrown from the train like merchandise to escape a fatal destination.
This could be a tale if it wasn't history. That of the Shoah, of the deportation, of the camps, told through the distance of children's stories, in the tale The Most Valuable of Goods by Jean-Claude Grumberg, and the symbolism of drawing, in the film adaptation by Michel Hazanavicius. “When we speak to children, there is an obligation to be delicate, but there is also an obligation to tell the truth. The strength of the story is to use metaphors while telling the truth and the dangers of the world “notes the filmmaker.
The choice of animation was imposed on the director, who is also a designer, in the adaptation of The Most Valuable of Goods : “The animation [est] to cinema what the tale is to literature. [C’est] a way of telling stories that is no longer prisoner of realism and the laws of gravity, which constrain us when we work with actors or real sets. It's as if we had access to an augmented reality, which gives access to poetry.”
How to represent the Shoah in cinema?
A “poor woodcutter”, a “poor woodcutter”, a “broken mouth”. Jean-Claude Grumberg's tale uses characters elevated to the rank of archetype, who give a universal scope to the story and the history it metabolizes. “The strength of Jean-Claude Grumberg's literary gesture is to tell us that the men and women who have massacred other men and other women en masse are our fellow men, and therefore, that we are all capable of it. He also tells us that we are capable of making the right choices. The film, by accepting our darkest part, encourages us to move towards our brightest part. It reminds us that we always have the choice of our behavior and our choices. actions”, confides Michel Hazanavicius.
Since the aftermath of the Second World War, cinema has been confronted with a fundamental ethical question: how to represent the horror of the Shoah and the hell of the extermination camps? How can we account for the experience of deportees and restore their humanity? A question that Michel Hazanavicius asked himself in the adaptation of The Most Valuable of Goodsas when representing the train transport of the deportees: “Putting 90 people in a cattle car, turning them around for five days without giving them anything to drink or eat, with just one chamber pot, is the staging of the Nazis. Me, as a director , do I accept, in the name of history, their staging or do I refuse it? [les déportés]give them dignity, reiterate that these people were human beings. For the duration of a sequence, I took a step aside, which is more moral than historical.”
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Lecture listen 1h 49min
To go further
- The Most Valuable of Goodsanimated film directed by Michel Hazanavicius, in cinemas on November 20, 2024. With the voices of Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Blanc, Denis Podalydès, Grégory Gadebois.
- The Most Valuable of Goodsstory by Jean-Claude Grumberg, new edition with illustrations by Michel Hazanavicius, Seuil, 2024
- Notebooks from Ukraine: snapshots from the Ukrainian front by Michel Hazanavicius, Éditions Allary, 2025
Sound references
Film excerpts:
- Children of Paradise by Marcel Carné, 1945
- Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, 1985
- The Most Valuable of Goods by Michel Hazanavicius, 2024
Musique :
- Credits: “Gendèr” by Makoto San, 2020
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