Shoah the Documentary

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, released in 1985, is the most ambitious documentary made about the Holocaust and the most polemical. The film runs for nine and a half hours, contains no archive footage, no music and no narrator, and consists entirely of present-day interviews shot at the sites of the killing in Poland, in Israel, in Germany, in Switzerland and in the United States. Lanzmann had begun work on the film in 1973 at the suggestion of the Israeli foreign ministry; the project ran for eleven years and produced over 220 hours of recorded interviews, of which the released film uses around nine and a half. The film is, in 2026, the most-cited single documentary work on the Holocaust and the principal counter-example to the Hollywood narrative tradition.

Lanzmann’s approach

Lanzmann had been a French resistance fighter, a journalist on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps modernes from the 1950s onwards, and the lover of Simone de Beauvoir for a period in the 1950s. He approached the Holocaust documentary project with a polemical conception of what such a film should be and should not be. He had been struck by what he regarded as the deadening effect of archive footage of the camps in earlier documentaries; the footage, he argued, had become so familiar to Western viewers that it had ceased to communicate what it had originally communicated. He resolved to make a film without any archive footage and to film only at the sites as they were in the present, through interviews with people who had been there.

The decision to shoot only in the present produced the film’s most distinctive visual register. The camera moves along the railway tracks at Treblinka in 1979 (the camp itself had been ploughed under by the Germans in 1943; by 1979 the site was a memorial in a forest). The camera follows the road from Włodawa to Sobibor. The camera shows the open meadow where the Chełmno gas vans had unloaded the bodies. None of these locations contains visible historical evidence in the present. The film makes the absence of evidence its subject; the contemporary site, photographed unrelentingly, is the testimony to what is no longer there.

The interviews

The film’s principal interviews are with three categories of witness. The first is Jewish survivors of the death camps, including Abraham Bomba, a barber at Treblinka who had cut the hair of women on their way to the gas chambers and who is interviewed in a barber’s shop in Tel Aviv as he cuts a customer’s hair; Filip Müller, a Sonderkommando survivor of Auschwitz who had worked at the crematoria and who is interviewed in front of an exhibit of victim’s hair; Simon Srebnik, one of two adult survivors of Chełmno (a thirteen-year-old at the time, kept alive as a singer by the SS guards who took him on the mile-long path to the killing site each day), who is shown standing in the same meadow at Chełmno in the present and recognised by elderly Polish villagers who had heard him sing as a boy in 1943 and 1944.

The second category is bystanders, mostly Polish villagers who had lived next to Treblinka, Sobibor, Chełmno or other killing sites. Lanzmann interviews them in their homes and outside their churches. Several of the interviews are uncomfortable: villagers who acknowledge having watched the deportations passing by, who admit having taken the property of murdered Jews, who describe the smell of the burning bodies, who joke that “the Jews talked too much”. Lanzmann’s camera does not soften these interviews; the bystander material is as much the film’s subject as the survivor material.

The third category is perpetrators, interviewed by Lanzmann under various forms of false pretences using a hidden camera. Franz Suchomel, an SS guard at Treblinka, is interviewed in his Bavarian apartment under the assumption that the recording is for a private historical project. Walter Stier, a railway transport officer who had organised the deportation trains, is interviewed in similar circumstances. The hidden-camera footage is grainy and the audio is poor; the perpetrators are clearly recognisable. The interviews record perpetrators describing their work in functional bureaucratic terms.

The film’s argument

Lanzmann’s central polemical claim was that the Holocaust was unrepresentable in narrative cinema. The act of dramatising the camps in fiction film, whatever the dramatist’s intentions, produced a redemptive structure (rising action, climax, resolution) that the events themselves did not have. Shoah is the film that refuses the redemptive structure; it has no plot, no protagonists in the dramatic sense, no resolution, no music to mark transitions. The viewer leaves the cinema after nine and a half hours having been refused the kinds of consolation cinema usually provides.

The polemical force of the film was directed substantially against earlier Holocaust documentaries that had used archive footage with musical scoring and explanatory narration. It was directed in advance against the kind of fictional narrative film that Schindler’s List would later exemplify. Lanzmann’s public attacks on Spielberg’s film in 1994 were a continuation of the position the documentary had embodied a decade earlier.

Reception and afterwards

The film was first screened in Paris in April 1985. It was widely regarded on release as the most important Holocaust documentary made; that view has not subsequently shifted in the academic literature. The Cahiers du Cinéma named it one of the major films of the post-war French cinema. The film has had limited general theatrical distribution but has been a constant presence in academic settings, in Holocaust museum archives, and in the catalogues of the major distributors.

The 220 hours of unused footage have been preserved at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and have been progressively made available online from the 2010s. Lanzmann himself produced four further films from the unused footage between 1997 and 2017, including The Karski Report (2010), based on his interview with Jan Karski about Karski’s wartime missions to inform the Western powers of the Holocaust. Lanzmann died in Paris in 2018 at the age of ninety-two.

See also

Sources

  • Claude Lanzmann (dir), Shoah, Les Films Aleph, 1985
  • Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, Atlantic Books, 2012
  • Stuart Liebman (ed), Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, Oxford University Press, 2007
  • Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Routledge, 1992 (chapter on the film)
  • Sue Vice, Shoah, BFI Film Classics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
  • Marcel Ophüls, “Closely Watched Trains“, in American Film, vol 11 no 1, 1985 (the major contemporary review)
  • USHMM, “Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah Outtakes Collection”, https://collections.ushmm.org