Shoah
by Claude Lanzmann
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DVD details
Actor: William LubtchanskyDirector: Claude Lanzmann
Cinematographer: Dominique Chapuis
Editor: Anna Ruiz
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); French (Original Language); German (Original Language); Hebrew (Original Language); Polish (Original Language); Yiddish (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Italian (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.37:1
Running Time: 503 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-10-07
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: New Yorker Video
DVD Reviews of Shoah
DVD Review: Living to Tell the Story
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been reading and studying about the Holocaust for roughly 45 years. When I was young I couldn't understand how such a thing could occur and yet it did and on such a mammouth scale that comprehension still escapes us. I had heard about "Shoah" for anumber of years and would have watched it sooner except I could never find it on any available network or other outlet. Thus I bought my own copy and watched it over the course of a couple of months.
"Shoah" is a set of 4 DVDs that have approximately 125 "chapters" overall and a viewing time of 9 1/2 hours. It consists of a number of interviews with Holocaust survivors, witnesses and even a few participants. The series of interviews are generally in a loosely chronological order as far as the events they describe. This makes for a more orderly (if that is possible) and focused perspective. The overall cast of interviewees are somewhat limited (thanks largely to the SS and similar obstacles) yet they provide a great deal of detailed eyewitness accounts of their experiences. There are two or three German officials interviewed (one who was apparently unaware he was being recorded) and their information was also an important inclusion in the overall accounts. The interviews often took place indoors but the director used plenty of outdoor footage of the actual sites in which the events being described took place. The last part of the last DVD focuses on the Warsaw Ghetto and the subsequent uprising. The account of Simha Rottem, a survivor of the Warsaw Getto uprising, may have been the most impressive of the many soberly stunning accounts in the film.
There are some aspects of the movie that I found less absorbing than others but they were very few. I thought that the director, Claude Lanzmann, spent too much time talking to Raul Hilberg, an historian. Mr. Hilberg had some relevant things to offer but he was an outsider in a film made up of interviewers with insiders. There was also a Polish leader by the name of Jan Karski who had a real hard time getting himself up to talking about what he had witnessed in the Warsaw Ghetto. I thought that his reaction to the relatively "tame" events and observations he shared were also out of sinc with the rest of the film.
"Shoah" is essential viewing for serious students of the Holocaust. The greater monstrosities are all there as well as the day to day life and the acceptance that their survival may have been as incomprehensible as the events they survived. There were a number of times during "Shoah" when the survivor is relating his observations almost non-challantly only to come to a point where a sudden reminder of a person, a comment, or an incident emotionally overwhelms them completely. After a moment or two of sheer anguish, the speaker continues on with his account as though nothing had interrupted his "presentation". The mixture of Humanity and inhumanity is the ultimate greatness of "Shoah".
DVD Review: Distorts Essential Facts: Corrections Provided
Summary: 2 Stars
This work includes interviews with Jewish sonderkommando survivors of Auschwitz, Polish peasants, Jan Karski (the legendary Polish Underground courier who tried in vain to warn the world about the Holocaust), Holocaust historian Raul Hillberg, a German official at Treblinka, and others.
Lanzmann should have examined fewer topics, and done so more thoroughly and objectively. He used only 9.5 hours out of 350 hours of taping, making one wonder what he left out. His work comes across as anti-Polish. Students of the Holocaust deserve better, and I now provide some context, a few of the necessary corrections, and links for further study from solely Jewish sources. From there, read my reviews.
The Polish peasants interviewed by Lanzmann exhibit a "Jews owned everything" mindset. In fact, there were many wealthy Jews and, even with the formal and informal discriminatory policies enacted to reverse Jewish economic dominance, the average Jew remained wealthier than the average Pole. See Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939 (Studies in the social sciences). In Poland, most peasants lived in poverty, and were stuck in it because the next-higher economic niche (the shopkeepers, tailors, shoemakers, etc.) was largely pre-occupied by Jews. This, rather than simple prejudice against or jealousy of Jewish successes, explains frequent Polish peasant resentments against Jews. Also, the employer-employee, seller-buyer, and lender-borrower relations are partly adversarial in nature. When there are different ethno-religious groups on each side of the divide, this will naturally generate frictions between groups.
One interviewed German tries to relativize German conduct. In fact, despite the fact that anti-Semitism existed in countless nations since time immemorial, it was only in Germany (Haman excepted) that it ever developed into a never-before-seen effort to exterminate the Jews. Also, the sources and course of anti-Jewish policies in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, and those in prewar Poland, were entirely different. See The Jewish war front.
Poles are portrayed as generally laughing at Jewish deaths and mocking Jews with the you-will-die gesture. Against both misrepresentations, see Am I A Murderer?: Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman.
As for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the conduct of the Polish Blue Police is incorrectly conflated with that of the collaborationist Ukrainian police. For the truth, see Martyrs and Fighters. Also, mention is made of some Poles turning-in Jews who had fled after the Uprising, but not the circumstances behind it. Besides imposing the automatic death penalty for the slightest assistance to individual Jews, the Germans had created draconian collective terror against the Polish population of Warsaw for any semblance of assistance to, or connection with, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Some Poles made life-or-death decisions to turn Jews in rather than risk large groups of Poles shot by the Germans in reprisal for the Germans killed by Jews during the Uprising. See Muranowska 7: The Warsaw ghetto rising.
Finally, Lanzmann's analysis is so Judeocentric that it is completely sanitized of any reference to Polish suffering. Did you know that Poles lived in daily fear of their lives, under near-starvation conditions, during the German occupation? Did you know that 3 million Polish gentiles (including about half of all educated Poles) were murdered by the Germans? There's much more: See the Peczkis Listmania: FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST...
For further analysis of Lanzmann, see Claude Lanzmann's Shoah: Key Essays (Casebooks in Criticism)
DVD Review: Stunning
Summary: 5 Stars
I have a good friend who is a WWII veteran. He liberated one of the concentration camps. He has always refused to talk about what he saw there. He said he couldn't possibly put words together that would describe it. This film, with stunning simplicity, does just that. It shows us just how depraved and callous the Holocaust was, and just how easy it was for those who were not its victims to go along with it whether through indifference or malice.
This film should be required viewing for everyone, everywhere. The Holocaust is over, but similar acts are going on in the world each and every day. Seeing this film will impart a sense of alarm and urgency. If everyone saw this film the day when this insanity stops might come a little sooner.
If crying in front of other people makes you uncomfortable, then make sure you watch this alone.
DVD Review: Dishonest Filmmaker...
Summary: 1 Stars
Lanzmann said that if he had found authentic pictures of homicidal gas chambers, he would have destroyed them. What he precisely said was this (Le Monde, March 3, 1994):
"There is not one second of archival material in Shoah because it is not the way I work or think, and besides it does not exist.... If I had found an existing film -- a secret film because that was forbidden -- shot by an SS and showing how 3,000 Jews, men, women and children, were dying together, asphyxiated in the gas chamber of Krema 2 in Auschwitz, not only would I have not shown it, but I would have destroyed it. I cannot say why. It goes by itself."
DVD Review: A monumental examination of mankind's darkest period
Summary: 5 Stars
SHOAH is too exhaustive a study (9 1/2 hours in length) to be considered the definitive Holocaust documentary. In 30 minutes, NIGHT AND FOG, Resnais' searing masterpiece gives us a concise picture of that awful period with images that are etched in our minds with the psychic equivalent of a branding iron. Lanzmann's effort is not about images anyway. It is about words. Words from people who lived through the nightmare. That's not to say there aren't images here that lacerate the heart of any reasonable and compassionate human being. These images however, are not of walking skeletons, or corpses piled up and tossed into mass graves, but of people reliving moments too horrible for the brain to process rationally.
Lanzmann interviews a few Jewish workers at Chelmno, who somehow miraculously escaped the fate of all their relatives and friends in the gas vans. He interviews a barber who cut the hair of people who minutes later were gassed at Treblinka. He talks to Filip Muller, one of the Sonderkommando (special detail) at Auschwitz, a Czech Jew who had to clean out the gas chambers and cremate the bodies. He also interviews a former Nazi guard at Treblinka (who doesn't know his testimony is being recorded for posterity) as well as a former high Nazi official responsible for maintaining the Warsaw ghetto prior to it's liquidation, whose failure to take any responsibility is notable. Lanzmann talks to Greek Jews who were shipped to Auschwitz and lost families. He talks to Poles who now live in homes once owned by Jews, or who lived near Treblinka and could hear screams at night. One of the most poignant interviews is with Jan Karski, a former Polish resistance fighter and liason to the government in exile, whose job it was to spread the word of the Jewish extermination to a world that basically didn't care enough to do anything to end the slaughter before the war ended in Europe. Karski gives a heartrending account of a tour through the Warsaw ghetto. Finally, Lanzmann interviews 2 survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, resistance fighters who have the cruel memories forever etched on their faces.
SHOAH was a monumental undertaking, and it really should be used as a tool to educate young people worldwide..educate them on the depths of depravity a so called civilized society can sink to under the right conditions, and educate them on what it means to have a conscience, and live with the moral, and ethical values necessary to be considered part of the human race.
Description of Shoah
To write a review of a film such as Shoah seems an impossible task: how to sum up one of the most powerful discourses on film in such a way as to make people realize that this is a documentary of immense consequence, a documentary that is not easy to watch but important to watch, a documentary that not only records the facts, but bears witness. We are commanded "Never forget"; this film helps us to fulfill that mandate, reverberating with the viewer long after the movie has ended. Yes, Holocaust films are plentiful, both fictional and non-, with titles such as The Last Days, Schindler's List, and Life Is Beautiful entering the mainstream. But this is not a film about the Holocaust per se; this is a film about people. It's a meandering, nine-and-a-half-hour film that never shows graphic pictures or delves into the political aspects of what happened in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, but talks with survivors, with SS men, with those who witnessed the extermination of 6?million Jews.Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years tracking people down, cajoling them to talk, asking them questions they didn't want to face. When soldiers refuse to appear on film, Lanzmann sneaks cameras in. When people are on the verge of breaking down and can't answer any more questions, Lanzmann asks anyway. He gives names to the victims--driving through a town that was predominantly Jewish before Hitler's time, a local points out which Jews owned what. Lanzmann travels the world, speaking to workers in Poland, survivors in Israel, officers in Germany. He is not a detached interviewer; his probings are deeply personal. One man farmed the land upon which Treblinka was built. "Didn't the screams bother you?" Lanzmann asks. When the farmer seems to brush the issues aside with a smile, Lanzmann's fury is noticeable. "Didn't all this bother you?" he demands angrily, only to be told, "When my neighbor cuts his thumb, I don't feel hurt." The responses, the details are difficult to hear, but critical nonetheless. Shoah tells the story of the most horrifying event of the 20th century, not chronologically and not with historical detail, but in an even more important way: person by person. --Jenny Brown
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