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Claude Lanzmann was born on November 27, 1925 in Bois-Colombes and died on July 5, 2018 in Paris.
He was the son of an antique dealer mother of Ukrainian Jewish origin and a decorator father of Latvian and Belarusian origin.
In 1942, while at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, Claude Lanzmann took part in the Jeunesses Communistes and organized the Resistance in and around the school.
From the age of 27, stimulated by daily life with Sartre, and Beauvoir with whom he lived as husband and wife for 7 years, he learned to handle words.
Commissioned by the newspaper Le Monde, Lanzmann visited Israel for the first time. He was delighted to discover "a whole world, a religion and age-old traditions". Overwhelmed by the profusion of his thoughts, he gave up writing his article, and, on Sartre's advice, began writing a book, which also never saw the light of day.
For many years, Lanzmann deepened his knowledge of Israel, where he spent time, in particular, preparing the special issue of Les Temps Modernes: "Le conflit israélo arabe", published in 1967.
He honed hisinterviewing skills through his work as a journalist, editor of the magazine Les Temps Modernes, television reporter, and author of films on Sartre and Beauvoir. Until then, he had always regretted, during his reports, "not to assume himself the totality of the operations which contribute to the birth of a filmed work". He then made "the shocking discovery of the possibilities" that cinema offers him.
While seeking financing for his first film, he wrote the screenplay for Élise ou la vraie vie, for Michel Drach, based on the novel by Claire Etcherelli. Then, at the age of forty-five, without ever having attended film school, he embarked on the shooting of Pourquoi Israël, surrounded by the best sound and image operators of the Nouvelle Vague.
"I wasn't afraid of the passage of time, something assured me that my existence would reach its full fruitfulness when it entered its second half. This unrealized reportage and aborted book became, twenty years later, my first film, Pourquoi Israël, which I shot relatively quickly because I knew precisely what I wanted to convey."
LeLièvre de Patagonie, Claude Lanzmann
Following the success of Pourquoi Israël in 1973, the Israeli government asked Lanzmann to make a film that "was the Shoah". Claude Lanzmann chose the only possible path: "to raise the dead to kill them a second time, but not alone" "to die with them and accompany them". With his team, they sought out and interviewed very special witnesses close to the death machine: the Sonderkommandos, the Poles living near the camps, or the Nazis themselves, whom he succeeded in getting to talk, with his unique way of interviewing. He recorded hundreds of hours of audio, shot 220 hours of film, then spent five years editing his film.
It took Claude Lanzmann twelve years to make Shoah, presented in 1985.
In 1987, after seeing Shoah , Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel's Minister of Defense, asked Lanzmann to make a film about the War of Independence, which Lanzmann declined. He proposed to Rabin a film about the reappropriation of force and violence by the Jews of Israel. The Minister of Defense accepted and opened the doors of the army to Lanzmann. The result was the film Tsahal, followed years later by Lights and shadows.
From the 220 hours of film footage of Shoah came other films: Un vivant qui passe - Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures - Le rapport Karski - Le dernier des injustes and Les quatre sœurs.
In 2007, he finally began writing his memoirs: Le lièvre de Patagonie, published in 2009 and awarded the Grand Prix Henri Gal by the Académie Française. Israel and the Holocaust are the two main subjects of Lanzmann's work.
However, in 2017, at the age of 92, he directed Napalm, the story of his impossible love affair with a North Korean nurse during his trip with Chris Marker and Armand Gatti in 1958.
His final film, The Four Sisters, hits theaters on Wednesday, July 4, 2018. Claude Lanzmann dies the following day. On July 12, 2018, Claude Lanzmann receives military honors and a national tribute in the courtyard of the Invalides.
Claude Lanzmann has received a number of prestigious awards for his work. His films have won awards at festivals around the world. He is Grand Officier de la Légion d'Honneur, Grand Croix de l'ordre national du Mérite and Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He also holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Amsterdam and Adelphi. In 2013, Claude Lanzmann was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for his body of work.