With his 9 1/2-hour Shoah, Claude Lanzmann has accomplished the seemingly impossible: He has brought such beauty to his recounting of the horror of the Holocaust that he has made it accessible and comprehensible.
Overview
Claude Lanzmann directed this 9½ hour documentary on the Holocaust without using a single frame of archive footage. He interviews survivors, witnesses, and ex-Nazis (whom he had to film secretly since they only agreed to be interviewed by audio). His style of interviewing, by asking for the most minute details, is effective at adding up these details to give a horrifying portrait of the events of Nazi genocide. He also shows, or rather lets some of his subjects show, that the anti-Semitism that caused 6 million Jews to die in the Holocaust is still alive and well in many people who still live in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere.
Director and cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
By straightforwardly presenting interviews with people who lived through the Holocaust, Lanzmann makes it real again. Even more impressively, he helps us to see how the horror could have happened.
Shoah is the greatest use of film in motion picture history, taking movies to their highest moral value. For what director/interviewer Lanzmann has done on film is nothing less than revive history, a history so ugly that many would prefer to forget.
[It] has transcended the cinema to become a primary record of the extermination of European Jews during the Second World War.
Why revisit "Shoah'' 25 years after it was first released? Because it matters more a quarter century on, just as it will matter even more in a hundred years, and 200, and - if it and we survive - a thousand.
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