Shoah

original title:
Shoah
country / year of production:
France / 1985
original length:
566 min. , color
premiere:
USA: 23 October 1985
genre:
Documentary
based on:
director:
Claude Lanzmann
film script:
producer:
cinematographer:
Dominique Chapuis , William Lubtchansky , Jimmy Glasberg
editor:
Anna Ruiz , Ziva Postec
composer:
cast (role):
more:
plot synopsis:
Director Lanzmann spent six years simply looking for eyewitnesses of the Holocaust or as the Israelis name it: the Shoah. Most of those witnesses are Germans and Poles who either worked in the camps or observed what went on in them. The interviews are interspersed with sequences of the places where the deaths took place, not as they were but as they are now. Grass and flowers grow on the mass graves, the tracks on which the inmates were transported are still used by trains, and the concentration camps themselves look like disused factories.
keywords:
concentration camps , anti-semitism , fascism , execution , post-war era , Holocaust
war:
Second World War (1939-1945)
literature:
Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer. „Gendered Translations. Claude Lanzmann's 'Shoah’“. In: Miriam Cooke, Angela Woollacott (eds.). Gendering War Talk. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993, 3-19.

Karl A. Plank. „The Survivor’s Return: Reflections on memory and places“. Judaism 38 (1989), 3, 263-277.

Claude Lanzmann. "Shoa". Paris: Fayard, 1985, 220 S.

Bernard Cuau (u.a.). "Au sujet de Shoa. Le film de Claude Lanzmann". Paris: Belin, 1990, 316 S.

Silke Schneider (Ed.). "Formen der Erinnerung. Eine Diskussion mit Claude Lanzmann. Ein anderer Blick auf Gedenken, Erinnern und Erleben. Eine Tagung". Marburg: Jonas-Verlag, 1998, 93 S.
remarks:
Lanzmann does not collect numbers, he is not interested in figures or exact chronology. Instead he participates the viewer in the process of recollection confronting him in a direct and harmful way with the eyewitnesses. They are former inmates of concnetraion camps, their guards, their accompilices, or observers. Some of the interviews were taken with a hidden, especially those of the perpetrators, since some of them only agreed to answer Lanzmann`s questions in private or merely agreed for an informal meeting.
Lanzmann is a very patient and symphathetic listener who gives his interviewees their time to remain silent and allows them to recompose as they face long suppressed memories.

Won serveral prices in 1986, for example the "César Award".
availability:
VHS, DVD