In 1973, Alouf Areven of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, won over by his film Pourquoi Israël, asked Claude Lanzmann to make a film that "was the Shoah".
How does one depict the killing and burning to ashes, using optimized industrial processes, of 6 million Jews - men, women, children and the elderly - and the Nazis' attempt to erase all traces of this crime? To embrace this unprecedented event, Claude Lanzmann chooses the only possible path: "Raise the dead to kill them a second time, but not alone", "Dying with them and accompanying them". He flushes out witnesses as close as possible to the death machine: the Sonderkommandos or Jewish laborers, slaves assigned to the gas chambers and ovens, the Polish inhabitants living next door to the killing centers, and the Nazis themselves, whom he manages to get to talk to and film with a hidden camera. The presence of every witness, whether Sonderkommando or Nazi, is a miracle in itself, given the difficulty of finding them and getting them to talk. As Claude Lanzmann has often explained, Jewish witnesses never say "I", they say "we". They are not survivors, but "returnees". They speak for the dead.
Claude Lanzmann invented a new form of cinema, neither documentary nor fiction. He directs; his works are films. For example, unable to obtain the right to film in Lithuania behind the Iron Curtain, he chose a forest in Israel reminiscent of the Ponary Forest, and had trees burnt in the background. He invented the boat on the river Ner, the smoky glades and the barber shop. From the nothing or almost nothing that remains, Claude Lanzmann magnificently invests the landscapes and confronts the witnesses with the scene of the crime.
Over seven years, he amassed a treasure trove of 220 hours of reels and as many audio interviews. Then, after five years of editing, he produced a monumental work of complex construction that has been compared to a Mahler symphony, a 9.30-hour work whose duration remains human.
To objections about the length of his film, Claude Lanzmann replied: "Six million Jews were murdered, and I spent 12 years of my life trying to tell their story. In my opinion, the film is too short, next question".
Claude Lanzmann wrote about the making of his film in his autobiographical book Le lièvre de Patagonie.
Shoah can impart knowledge of the 20th century's greatest atrocity to anyone over the age of 12, without a single image from archives that don't exist anyway, in a unique experience of unprecedented richness, that makes you different, more intelligent, better, transforming the spectator into a witness responsible in turn for transmitting the event. Shoah can be viewed in a single sitting, or in shorter or longer chunks. It is divided into 2 parts on 4 DVDs.
We retain very little of the centuries. The 20th century is the century of the Shoah. It is also the century of cinema. Shoah will live on in the memory of mankind.
