In 1973, Alouf Aeven from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, won over by his film Why Israel, asks Claude Lanzmann to make a film that “is the Shoah”.
How to represent the killing and reduction to ashes by optimized industrial processes, of 6 million Jews, men, women, children, old people, then the attempt to erase all traces of this crime by the Nazis? To embrace this unprecedented event, Claude Lanzmann chose the only possible path: “Resurrecting the dead to kill them a second time, but not alone”, “To die with them again and to accompany them”. He finds witnesses 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 presence of each witness, Sonderkommando or Nazi, is a miracle in itself, as it was so difficult to find them and then get them to talk. As Claude Lanzmann has explained many times, Jewish witnesses never say “I”, they say “we”. They are not survivors but “ghosts”. They speak for the dead.
Claude Lanzmann invents a new form of cinema, neither documentary nor fiction. He directs; his works are movies. For example, not having obtained the right to film in Lithuania behind the Iron Curtain, he chose a forest in Israel that was reminiscent of the Ponary forest and had trees burned in the background. He invented the boat on the Sea, the smoking glades, the hairdressing salon. Starting from nothing or almost nothing that remains, Claude Lanzmann magnificently invests the landscapes and confronts the witnesses at the scene of the crime.
For seven years, he accumulated a treasure, a corpus of 220 hours of reels, and as many audio interviews. Then, in five years of editing, he produced a monumental work with a complex construction that was compared to a Mahler symphony, a 9:30 a.m. work whose duration remains human.
Faced with objections about the length of his film, Claude Lanzmann answered: “Six million Jews were murdered, I spent 12 years of my life trying to tell their story, in my opinion the film is too short, next question”.
Claude Lanzmann recounted the shooting of his film in his autobiographical book The Patagonian hare.
Shoah can transmit to anyone over the age of 12 the knowledge about the greatest atrocity of the 20th century, without a single archival image that in any case does not exist, in a unique experience of unheard of richness, which makes different, smarter, better, making the viewer a better person, transforming the spectator into a witness responsible in turn for the transmission of the event. Shoah can be seen in one go as well as in more or less long pieces. It is divided into 2 parts on 4 DVDs.
Very little is remembered from centuries. The 20th century is the century of the Holocaust. It is also the century of cinema. Shoah will remain in the memory of mankind.
