Shoah
France, 1985; 9½ hours
Directed by Claude Lanzmann

A handful of outstanding works of art tower over the many useful and even important documentary films made on Holocaust themes, and we see two of them in this course: Night and Fog (in our first class) and this film. Of the two, Night and Fog employs the more straightforward technique -- a brief, impressionistic montage of film clips, many made at the time by the Nazis themselves, accompanied by a poetic voice-over and a haunting score -- and its status as a permanent classic is secure. Shoah, distinctive in form and vastly long, is controversial. That it is one of the most important films on the Holocaust is hard to doubt, and a distinguished fellow documentarist, Marcel Ophuls, has called it "the greatest documentary about contemporary history ever made, bar none". However, not everyone admires the choices made and strategies used by its director, Claude Lanzmann.

Lanzmann himself is a survivor, in a way: as a French Jewish youth he lived in hiding throughout the war. His film, however, is not about experiences like his, nor even about so harsh a form of victimization as the Polish ghettos: it is about the killing operations and especially the death camps.

While the full nine-and-a-half hours of the film are inconspicuously structured in various ways, its structure is not critical to what it has to say; much of its impact will be felt by someone who sees only part of it.