Claude Lanzmann

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Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Holocaust documentary Shoah took 12 years to make. Compiling over 350 hours of footage, including interviews with individuals in 14 countries, the final cut clocks in at over nine hours. It’s fascinating how the mind’s immediate reaction to this seminal piece of filmmaking tends towards the numerical. Dehumanisation was a vital facet of the Final Solution, often through consideration of the ‘Jewish problem’ in mathematical terms. That human coping mechanism, towards the empirical, adds just another layer of psychological and emotional complexity to this staggering work.Read More »

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Using interviews and other footage shot especially for this documentary, French director Claude Lanzmann investigates the state of Israel in 1972. This movie concentrates on Israelis going about their business of everyday living. One interview shows the reactions of a concentration camp survivor, now a police chief, to being called a “Nazi” by demonstrators. Another segment follows the experiences of a Russian Jewish immigrant, beginning with his first visit to the Wailing Wall and continuing to his disturbing perception that he is welcomed more by virtue of his being Russian than for the fact that he is Jewish.Read More »

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1975. In Rome, Claude Lanzmann filmed Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto, the only “Elder of the Jews” not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Murmelstein fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, week after week for seven years, managing to help around 121,000 Jews leave the country, and preventing the liquidation of the ghetto.Read More »

The Sobibor uprising in 1943 in Poland was investigated by Mr. Lanzmann many years ago when he was filming “Shoah” and his interviews with a participant named Lerner date from then. The director felt that the Sobibor uprising, which led to the closure of the extermination camp by the Nazis after many escaped, was too important to be a small part of his epic documentary. Now he has returned to this little known story.Read More »

Her consistently and relentlessly painful account during the shoot of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah makes for an attempt at understanding how one can be part of a convoy which – with Eichmann’s agreement – saved hundreds of Hungarian Jews while at the same time some 450.000 of their kin were either dying in the gas chambers of Birkenau, or burned alive in the open air in order to keep up with the pace the Nazis demanded.Read More »

Of the hundred ghettos that dotted the Polish countryside, the one in Lodz had existed for the longest. It was ruled with an iron fist by the president of the Jewish council of elders, Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, known as “King Chaim” – a man convinced he could save part of the community by turning them into manpower to serve the Germans.Read More »

From MUBI:
Four Sisters, a quartet of Lanzmann documentaries that recently premiered at the New York Film Festival, avoids many of the pitfalls of the often-irascible documentarian’s lesser films by dint of its remarkable self-effacement. Devoted to the frequently jaw-dropping stories of four women who survived the Holocaust, the films—The Hippocratic Oath, Baluty, The Merry Flea, and Noah’s Ark— confirm that filmed oral history is Lanzmann’s métier. This seems particularly noteworthy in an era where the macro-historical approach of scholars such as Timothy Snyder has become embraced as the best conceptual tool for defining and explicating the Holocaust. Read More »

From MUBI:
Four Sisters, a quartet of Lanzmann documentaries that recently premiered at the New York Film Festival, avoids many of the pitfalls of the often-irascible documentarian’s lesser films by dint of its remarkable self-effacement. Devoted to the frequently jaw-dropping stories of four women who survived the Holocaust, the films—The Hippocratic Oath, Baluty, The Merry Flea, and Noah’s Ark— confirm that filmed oral history is Lanzmann’s métier. This seems particularly noteworthy in an era where the macro-historical approach of scholars such as Timothy Snyder has become embraced as the best conceptual tool for defining and explicating the Holocaust.Read More »

new york times review (january 1995)
If “Tsahal,” opening today at the Walter Reade Theater, initially seems to admire that toughness unquestioningly, it eventually grows into a thoughtful exegesis of a troubling, complex subject. This film provoked a tear-gas bombing at a Paris movie theater last November, but it isn’t inflammatory on its own merits. Mr. Lanzmann, whose background in philosophy shapes his film making in palpable ways, is more pensive than judgmental. He seeks the essence of Israel’s embattled existence during “46 years of perpetual alarm.” Slowly, doggedly, he arrives at a profound understanding of it by the time “Tsahal” is over.Read More »