"Shoah" on Unesco's Memory of the World Register

The Association Claude et Felix Lanzmann (A.C.F.L.), chaired by Dominique Lanzmann, the director's widow, announces the inscription of Shoah (1985), film-monument by French director Claude Lanzmann, to UNESCO's 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 Claude Lanzmann's film in 1985 in Europe, while in the USA the word "Holocaust" is used.

The French and German National Commissions for UNESCO had jointly proposed Shoah for the Memory of the World. The ACFL is the French candidate, while the Jewish Museum of Berlin is the German candidate, chosen by the ACFL as the depository of the Shoah preparatory sound archives. 

Shoah joins the archives of the Lumière brothers, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados and all the Bergman films in the Memory of the World. A primordial work of oral history, Shoah also joins The Diary of Anne Frank, the archives of the Warsaw ghetto, those of the Auschwitz trials and the collection of testimonies at Yad Vashem. History retains very little of the centuries. The twentieth century is the century of the Shoah, but it is also the century of cinema. UNESCO's inscription on the Memory of the World list confirms the unique place of this masterpiece between art and history.

With Shoah, Claude Lanzmann unleashes the word of camp returnees. He unearths and makes speak the witnesses closest to the death machine: the Sonderkommandos or Jewish laborers, slaves assigned to the gas chambers and ovens, the Polish inhabitants living next to the killing centers, and the Nazis themselves, whom he manages to make speak and film with a hidden camera.

The French director invents a new form of cinema, neither documentary nor fiction. He stages, from the nothing or almost nothing that remains, magnificently invests landscapes and confronts witnesses with crime scenes. 

" I could never have imagined such an alliance of horror and beauty. Of course, one is not used to mask the other, nor is it a question of aestheticism: on the contrary, it highlights the other with such invention and rigor that we are aware of contemplating a great work. A pure masterpiece. Simone de Beauvoir on Shoah.

Shoah consists of nine hours and twenty-six minutes of film, two hundred and twenty hours of film held at the USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) in Washington, and just as many audio interviews held at the Jewish Museum Berlin, the institution chosen by the ACFL: a powerful symbol of the Franco-German friendship for which Claude Lanzmann has worked since 1947. 

After having organized, in partnership with the French Ministry of Education, the broadcasting of extracts from Shoah to high school classes in France, the ACFL is counting on UNESCO to extend its work on a worldwide scale. Indeed, Shoah can transmit knowledge of the 20th century's greatest atrocity to anyone over the age of 12, transforming the spectator into a witness who is in turn responsible for transmitting the event.

As such, from November 6 to December 20, 2023, Shoah and all Claude Lanzmann's film work will be the subject of a complete retrospective at the Bibliothèque Publique d'Information du Centre Pompidou, ahead of the centenary of Claude Lanzmann's birth, the 40th anniversary of the release of Shoah and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps in 2025.