Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.
Until the 1960s, Israel had shown little interest in the Holocaust. The survivors, their stories, the Yiddish many of them spoke – these were all seen as shameful reminders of Jewish weakness, of the life in exile that the Jewish state had at last brought to an end. But with the Eichmann trial, and particularly after the 1967 war, Israel discovered that the Holocaust could be a powerful weapon in its ideological arsenal. […] In the 27 years since its release, the film’s defects have come into sharper focus. There is no discussion of anti-Bolshevism and Social Darwinism, as integral to Nazi ideology as anti-semitism; no account of the invasion of the Soviet Union, which accelerated the process of extermination; and hardly a mention of non-Jewish victims – Gypsies, or the mentally ill or homosexuals. […] In the absence of explanation and historical context, and with non-Jewish victims removed from the picture, Lanzmann’s Holocaust is the story of Jews facing an eternally hostile Gentile world where another genocide is always a latent possibility.
— Adam Shatz (London Review of Books)
The first post-war Europe was built upon deliberate mis-memory—upon forgetting as a way of life. Since 1989, Europe has been constructed instead upon a compensatory surplus of memory: institutionalised public remembering as the very foundation of collective identity. The first could not endure—but nor will the second. Some measure of neglect and even forgetting is the necessary condition for civic health […] Without [a substantial] collective amnesia, Europe’s astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible. To be sure, much was put out of mind that would subsequently return in discomforting ways. But only much later would it become clear just how much post-war Europe rested on foundation myths that would fracture and shift with the passage of years. In the circumstances of 1945, in a continent covered with rubble, there was much to be gained by behaving as though the past was indeed dead and buried and a new age about to begin. The price paid was a certain amount of selective, collective forgetting, notably in Germany. But then, in Germany above all, there was much to forget.
— Tony Judt: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Many may not remember that films like Schindler’s List came about partly to answer louder anti-Semitic voices in the American mainstream in the late 80s/early 90s, like David Duke running for high office and the rise of various white nationalist militia groups.[…]
In his review, Roger Ebert says of the film, “It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness.” But that’s not accurate. It is a documentary. It’s consciously constructed as non-fiction filmmaking in which Lanzmann made distinct choices to go against the grain of prevailing documentary trends. To say it is an “act of witness” also overlooks the prevaricating or reluctance of some of his subjects. […] Ebert refers to Lanzmann’s approach as a “mosaic”—but even here, a mosaic is a collection of small pieces that form a larger shape. The larger shape of Shoah seems to be “there sure was a lot of death and suffering in the Holocaust”—and if that’s the “shape” of it, then we’re forced to ask: What does Lanzmann hope to leave with his viewer at the end of this experience, even if the film’s length and design is intended to convey that this tragedy hasn’t really “ended”? […] Ebert notes the cruelty in Lanzmann’s demand[s], but then says, “Lanzmann is cruel, but he is correct. He must go on. It is necessary to make this record before all of those who were witnesses to the Holocaust have died.” That may be true, but that is not for us or Lanzmann to decide. We are not owed traumatic confessionals for the purposes of art or history. To look at someone who has lost a piece of their soul in a parade of horrors and say, “Now give us more,” is a bridge too far.
[…]
I would argue that for all the breadth of Lanzmann’s vision, it lacks specificity in its aims. It is a mosaic without a picture. […] If anything, the film seems to consciously reject an epic sweep, consistently looking for the quiet and intimate contrasted against the intense, dehumanizing horrors described by those being interviewed.
[…]
[W]ithout any Jewish identity outside the Holocaust, all we’re left with is trauma. Part of what pushed me away from Judaism in my youth was the way adults in my life tried to center it around a Holocaust/Israel narrative, where there’s nothing moral or spiritual to be found. If your world is now death, then all that remains is cold, hard survival.
The absence of archival footage has been noted so often, for such a long time, that it is now built into all thumbnail descriptions of the film. The unusual running time is another constant topic, often engaged from an extremely dubious angle. There has been, I think, an unspoken sense of Shoah’s running time as culturally merited, so to speak, by its subject matter, as if watching the entire film were the responsible thing to do, like attending a funeral.
— Kent Jones (Criterion)
[M]emory haunts Lanzmann’s pastoral exteriors for the rest of the film. There’s an overwhelming sense here that nature itself has yet to recover from Hitler’s slaughter.
— Ed Gonzalez (Slant Magazine)
The filmmaker omits a number of key elements of cinematic artifice that might enable an audience to distance themselves from his subject. There’s no narration to tie large swaps of footage together with grand, sweeping through lines, no re-enactments to goose audiences with conventional drama, and no musical score to conveniently cue Pavlovian emotional responses.
— Chuck Bowen (Slant Magazine)
The Holocaust becomes even more real as the viewer watches the pressure of memory and the past weighing on Shoah’s interviewees, the way witnesses do not look at Lanzman but search nowhere with their eyes to locate a memory. A major part of watching the film is seeing how human beings react and cope with their recollections. […] To be sure, the film achieves unforgettable imagery through the power of words. […] Throughout Shoah, Lanzmann locates poignant images of pedestrians passing through the contemporary remains of several concentration camps. A brief shot inside of the now-crumbling Auschwitz finds a boy walking his bike through the grounds. Is this part of his routine? Is there no other road for him to take? Images such as this suggest that acceptance has occurred. People have healed, moved on, or were never made aware, which represents the acceptance of their elders and teachers.
— Brian Eggert (Deep Focus Review)
