Claude Lanzmann: 27 November 1925‒5 July 2018

Claude Lanzmann, who has died in Paris at the age of 92, was one of the great documentary film-makers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, best known for his revolutionary masterpiece Shoah, a nine-and-a-half-hour film which abjured documentary footage and a musical score and was based only on interviews, often conducted in the locations where mass murder had taken place.

Lanzmann was born into a secular Jewish family with roots in eastern Europe, the eldest of three children. His brother, Jacques, became a successful writer and his sister, Évelyne, a well-known actress. His parents separated in 1934 and he became radicalized in the 1930s, partly as a result of his experience of antisemitism in his school in Paris.

Under the Nazi occupation, his father and the three children moved to the country—Lanzmann has described how their father timed them as they practised escaping to a shelter he had dug near their house. He continued to attend school in Clermont-Ferrand, helping to smuggle arms and ammunition to the Resistance. After the war he was an active member of the French left, working at the journal Les Temps modernes with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who was his lover for nine years. Together with them he was one of the signatories in September 1960 of the ‘Manifesto of the 121’, which called on French soldiers to refuse to fight in Algeria. Although he was indicted for this, in the end no action was taken against him. He remained in touch with both Sartre and de Beauvoir, and, long after their affair had ended, de Beauvoir provided much of the financial support for Shoah. A prolific journalist, Lanzmann wrote for a number of journals, including extensive accounts for Le Monde and Les Temps modernes of the situation in Germany, where he had studied philosophy at the University of Tübingen and taught at the Free University of Berlin.

Lanzmann had long been fascinated by the cinema. Immediately after the war, he spent some time in Israel, and his first film, a three-hour documentary, Pourquoi Israël (‘Why Israel’; 1973), which began as a set of interviews with Israeli soldiers in Sinai which he conducted for a French television programme, was the product of his discomfort at the portrayal by his friends of the Jewish state as a colonial enterprise—he had edited a special issue of the journal Les Temps modernes with Sartre on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Shoah, his masterpiece, appeared in 1985 and grew out of this film. He was approached by an Israeli official to make a two-hour documentary about the Holocaust from the ‘Jewish point of view’. However, when the initial research had still not been completed far beyond the budgeted eighteen months, the Israelis withdrew their support. In the event, the project would take over eleven years to complete and would result in 350 hours of raw footage which was condensed into the mammoth nine-and-a-half-hour epic (originally thirteen hours).

The epoch-making character of this film has been widely recognized. According to Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker on 6 July 2018,

Shoah, the crucial cinematic confrontation with the Holocaust (a word that Lanzmann hated), changed the history of cinema with its absolute absence of archival footage, with its incarnation of history in the present tense as a first-hand, first-person act of political engagement. It changed political history with its journalistic revelations and its moral insights.

Writing in Vogue on 7 July 2018, Leslie Camhi described the technique of the film as follows:

Traveling to 14 countries, he sought out survivors, eyewitnesses, and perpetrators—Polish peasants, Nazi officials, Jews forced to work in the gas chambers, the surviving fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—and compelled them to testify, occasionally (as in the case of a former SS officer and guard at Treblinka) filming them in secret.

Without recourse to archival footage or documents, Shoah uses the most minimal of means; a single camera focused on the human face, with emotions...