Claude Lanzmann

With Claude Lanzmann’s passing at the age of ninety-two on July 5, 2018, the world lost an intellectual and filmmaker whose influence on visual representation of the Holocaust was transformative. Born on November 27, 1925 in the Parisian suburb of Bois-Colombes, Lanzmann belonged to the generation to whose annihilation his films bore witness, even though he lost no members of his immediate family. During the Second World War he balanced the demands of school with his activities for the Communist resistance. After the war, he studied at the Sorbonne and in Germany, wrote a dissertation on Leibniz, worked as a journalist, and became involved in the intellectual circle surrounding Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and their journal Les Temps Modernes. Lanzmann lived with de Beauvoir from 1952 to 1959, took over de Beauvoir’s editorship of that influential leftist literary and political publication after she died in 1986, and remained in that position until his own death. As a journalist in postwar France, Lanzmann traveled widely and wrote news articles, celebrity profiles, and in-depth reportage.

To reflect on the life and work of Claude Lanzmann in the context of Holocaust and genocide studies, however, is primarily to speak of Shoah (1985), the 550-minute epic with which his name is synonymous. In a 2014 British Film Institute poll of 340 critics and filmmakers about the greatest documentaries ever made, Shoah ranked second.¹ Elie Wiesel understatedly wrote of Shoah,“This is a film that must be seen.”²

Shoah originated in 1973, the same year Lanzmann released Pourquoi Israël (Israel, Why), a three-hour documentary about the Jewish state’s first quarter-century. In his 2009 memoir The Patagonian Hare, Lanzmann recalled a discussion with his friend Alouph Hareven, an Israeli government official, after Pourquoi Israël’s release. Haraven noted, “There is no film about the Shoah, no film that takes in what happened in all its magnitude, no film that shows it from our point of view, the viewpoint of the Jews. It’s not a matter of making a film about the Shoah, but a film that is the Shoah.”³ Lanzmann accepted this charge, and while the film he initially intended was to be of standard feature length, the project grew rapidly into something much grander in scope and, ultimately, in impact. Lanzmann would spend over a decade in the 1970s and 1980s recording interviews in fourteen countries to create it.

Shoah was very much Lanzmann’s magnum opus, and his legacy overwhelmingly and justifiably rests on it, along with others created from the so-called Shoah “outtakes.” Co-owned by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, these encompass approximately 220 hours of Lanzmann’s interviews with the perpetrators, victims, collaborators, and others who bore witness to the human and technological workings of genocide. He developed several other lengthy films from outtakes that did not make the final cut, notably A Visitor From the Living (1999); Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001); The Karski Report (2010); The Last of the Unjust (2013); and his final film, Four Sisters (2018). The USHMM has spent two decades and over $1 million restoring the outtakes, digitizing them, and making them available on its website.⁴ This newly accessible material is already animating a new generation of scholarship on Shoah and Lanzmann’s other films.⁵

To viewers whose image of the Holocaust derives from mass cultural representations, many offering non-representative stories of rescue and redemption, Shoah makes for an unfamiliar viewing experience, and not only because, in Lanzmann’s words, the film’s subject was “death itself, death rather than survival.”⁶ The film’s disorienting character begins with its title. When an organizer of the film’s première was printing invitations and asked Lanzmann what the film’s title meant, the director said, “it means ‘Shoah.’” The organizer responded, “But you have to translate, no one would understand,” whereupon Lanzmann rejoined: “That’s exactly what I want, for no one to understand.”⁷ As evidence of the film’s impact, this Hebrew word “Shoah” (“annihilation”) has...