The Claude and Felix Lanzmann Association (A.C.F.L.), chaired by Dominique Lanzmann, widow of the director, announces the registration of Shoah (1985), a monument film by French director Claude Lanzmann, on the UNESCO Memory of the World register.
Shoah, the Hebrew word for “Catastrophe,” refers to the extermination of six million Jews during the Second World War. The term “the Shoah” has been used since 1948 in Israel and since the release of the film by Claude Lanzmann in 1985 in Europe, while in the United States the word “Holocaust” is used.
The French and German National Commissions of UNESCO jointly proposed the candidacy of Shoah To the Memory of the World. The ACFL is applying for France and the Jewish Museum of Berlin for Germany, chosen by the ACFL as repository of the preparatory sound archives of Shoah.
Shoah thus joins the cinematographic heritage of the Memory of the World, the archives of the Lumière Brothers, Metropolis by Fritz Lang, Los Olvidados by Luis Buñuel, and all of Bergman. An essential work in oral history, Shoah Joins also Anne Frank's Diary, the archives of the Warsaw ghetto, those of the Auschwitz trial and the collection of testimonies from Yad Vashem. History remembers very little of the centuries. The 20th century is the century of the Shoah, it is also the century of Cinema. The UNESCO Memory of the World inscription confirms the unique place of this masterpiece between art and history.
With Shoah, Claude Lanzmann frees the voice of those returning from the camps. He finds and makes witnesses speak as close as possible to the death machine: the Sonderkommandos or Jewish workers, slaves assigned to gas chambers and ovens, the Polish inhabitants adjacent to the killing centers, and the Nazis themselves whom he succeeds in getting people to talk and film with a hidden camera.
The French director invents a new form of cinema, neither documentary nor fiction. He stages, starting from the nothing or almost nothing that remains, magnificently invests the landscapes and confronts witnesses at the scene of the crime.
” I could not have imagined such a combination of horror and beauty. Certainly, one is not used to mask the other, it is not a question of aesthetics: on the contrary, it highlights it with so much invention and rigor that we are aware that we are contemplating a great work. A pure masterpiece. ” Simone de Beauvoir about Shoah.
Shoah, It's nine hours twenty-six minutes of film, two hundred twenty hours of film preserved at the USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) in Washington and just as many audio interviews, preserved at the Jewish Museum Berlin, Jewish Museum of Berlin, institution chosen by the ACFL: a strong symbol of Franco-German friendship for which Claude Lanzmann worked since 1947.
After organizing, in partnership with National Education, the distribution of extracts from Shoah in high school classes in France, ACFL is counting on UNESCO to be able to extend its work globally. In fact, Shoah can transmit to anyone over the age of 12, the knowledge about the greatest atrocity of the 20th century, and turns the viewer into a witness responsible in turn for the transmission of the event.
As such, from November 6 to December 20, 2023, Shoah and all of Claude Lanzmann's cinema works will be the subject of a complete retrospective at the Public Information Library of the Pompidou Center, ahead of the centenary of the birth of Claude Lanzmann, 40 years since the release of Shoah and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps in 2025.
