Claude Lanzmann speaking to a former Nazi SS guard who worked at Treblinka: "Mr. Suchomel, we're not discussing you....we're discussing Treblinka."The interview was recorded only after Lanzmann pretended to be a sympathetic journalist writing about Treblinka--wanting neutrally to get the facts.
Although it seems that Lanzmann is using his razor-sharp irony here - part of his lie to get in to see an infamous Treblinka guard (he told him he didn't want to focus on the individual crimes but wanted to get a precise sense of the camp) - actually in the end I think it's true that Lanzmann isn't interested in Suchomel. He wants to get Suchomel to help him paint the broadest possible canvas - the big picture of the genocide across the landscape.
A YouTube video version of this scene.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
