Shoah

1985
8.7| 9h26m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 01 November 1985 Released
Producted By: Ministère de la culture
Country: France
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

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.

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Reviews

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment
Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.
Staci Frederick Blistering performances.
saraccan Now it's commonly used in the Hebrew language to refer to the 1940's ethnocide of the Jewish people. Different thing about Shoah is that, they didn't use any archive footage at all. It's all done through interviews with real survivors, German/allied soldiers that worked in the camps and other people who lived to tell their stories. You could literally make a separate movie from every different story you hear in this documentary.Holocaust is not an unknown topic to a lot of people but hearing some of these gruesome details from the people who experienced it first hand, gives you a completely new perspective.
simon-page-1 I have just recently watched this film in two parts, over two weeks. Yes, it is long. So what? I find it unbelievable that people can complain about the length of this film. Did you not know how long the film was before watching it? Oh dear.. did you get a 'bit bored' by the history of the mass extinction of the Jews? Did you run out of popcorn? The whole point of the film is to document the horror and also the complicity of others, not just the Nazis. The slow pace of the film gives us time to reflect on the misery and horror. The cold bleakness of the Polish landscape and the timeless quality only enhances and evokes feelings of depression and misery. The film has had a profound effect on me. It has made me angry and sad. It has made me want to tell other people. It is doing it's job, and will continue to do so as long as it exists and people watch it.
Vihren Mitev With commenting this film we are going out of the movie industry to get into history and the world that it shaped. This rating concerns the importance of the theme of the movie and the effort and the enormous importance of the established work.The film draws us into the deepest, dark and dirty human intentions that led to and are even devoid of any humane sense. It is shown the downfall of modern humanity, which mimics the barbaric world of the past. The long centuries of experience appear to be insufficient to call for peace and universal existence. On the contrary, it seems that the negative trends will not disappear very soon.Although it is not shown any atrocity, the stories of witnesses of the war are enough to push our imagination to unthinkable mental pictures. It remains impossible to think and honestly to sympathize to storytellers due to lack of language in which we could understand what they experienced. We can only be able to pity them when they do not find the strength to continue their stories and to bow to their power to tell everyone about the downfall of much part of mankind.Extremely long and difficult story that requires serious approach and interest in the topic. Valuable result.http://vihrenmitevmovies.blogspot.com/
ackstasis Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour Holocaust documentary is difficult, painful, and, above all else, exhausting – both emotionally and physically. I watched this goliath over four nights, and I pretty much had to force myself into every viewing, knowingly condemning myself to two hours of misery. But I wouldn't trade the experience. There are movies, and then there are... well, there are no words for what this is. Lanzmann spent six years tracking down and interviewing Jewish survivors, German commanders, and Polish eye-witnesses, reconstructing through oral testimonies – without even a second of archival footage – the horror of the Nazi death camps. The dialogue, often interminably filtered through an interpreter and then translated from French via subtitles, is overlaid on footage of the death camps as they stand now (that is, in the 1970s/80s), as innocuous ruins or grassy fields. Thus, Lanzmann juxtaposes the atrocities described in his interviews with the quietude of the modern-day locations, acknowledging from the outset the impossibility of ever fully recreating or appreciating the horrors that took place.Throughout the film, we mostly perceive Lanzmann as an off-camera interviewer, but he nevertheless takes a very active role in the film's presentation. We note his determination to assemble a historical record at all costs: he includes footage of himself assuring Franz Suchomel, a former SS officer, that the interview is not being filmed. (Many alleged perpetrators are seen only through a grainy black-and-white hidden camera, a device that keeps them emotionally distant from the viewer, as in a 1940s newsreel). Lanzmann rather sardonically asks his interpreter to complement a German couple on their beautiful home, knowing full well that it once belonged to a Jewish family.The interviews with Jewish survivors are most haunting of all. Lanzmann doesn't ask them to communicate their emotions, but instead needles them for details, seemingly inconsequential observations that nevertheless improve our understanding of how the Final Solution operated. But he also knows when to keep quiet. The silent anguish evident on the survivors' old, scarred faces is often more powerful than words could ever be. One survivor of the Warsaw Uprising remarks to Lanzmann, "if you could lick my heart, it would poison you." We can see this even in his face.