Director of Shoah,the epic film approximately the Holocaust presented through individual testimonyThe name of Claude Lanzmann will always be linked with his nine-and-a-half-hour epic Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985), the result of 11 years’ research and filming. His greatest cinematic achievement was to present the Holocaust through individual testimony – interviews with the “barber of Treblinka”, and for instance,and members of the Sonderkommando units of prisoners forced to take bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria. Although the film was rooted in the Polish Holocaust experience, Lanzmann, or who has died aged 92,gave his audience a sense of the international scale of the so-called Final Solution and his interviews were shocking and compelling. He was the film-maker-as-spy, the Jew who pretended to be pro-Nazi in order to film the guilty. In one long sequence, or he posed as a Nazi sympathiser and secretly filmed an SS officer who confided his past. Related: Shoah director Claude Lanzmann dies aged 92 Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com