Claude Lanzman

At that time I frequented quite a film library, but I confess that I did not see the complete Shoah . Not for lack of interest, the monumental 1985 film captured, and left for posterity for the memory of a very low moment in the history of humanity, the attempt to systematically exterminate the Jewish people. Maybe I was tired that day, I’m not sure, and at some point I left; but I did know that I had seen part of an important work, of undoubted historical interest, surely Steven Spielberg would not have made Schindler’s List or promoted his project to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, had there not been Shoah . And yet, he viewed Hollywood’s King Midas film as “a kitsch melodrama.”

Claude Lanzmann was born in Bois-Colombes, in France, in 1925. His Jewish ancestors link him to Eastern Europe, they arrived in France at the end of the 19th century. He will suffer the divorce of his parents when he is not yet ten years old. Affiliated with the communist youth, he participated in the Resistance’s fight against the Nazis during World War II. With extensive humanist and philosophical training acquired at the end of the war, he passed through the universities of the Sorbonne in Paris and Eberhard in Tübingen, and obtained a position as a reader at the Free University of Berlin, located in the western sector.

In his understanding of the meaning of existence, he claims to move between Stendhal and Sartre. Precisely reading this second leads him to organize a seminar on anti-Semitism, something that his students demand. And it is that he is concerned about the lack of denazification in some intellectual environments, while he soaks up his roots by undertaking a trip to Israel in 1952. As a journalist-essayist, he will write for France Dimanche and Les Temps Modernes. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir will honor him with his friendship; with the second he will have a loving relationship between 1952 and 1959; he will go through several marriages, one with the actress Judith Magre. His anti-colonialist views, in relation to Algeria and Korea, will cause him serious difficulties. born debater,

1970 marks the beginning of Lanzmann’s relationship with cinema, it is never too late if happiness is good. He is then 45 years old. He works without haste and without pause, and in 1973 he delivers Pourquoi Israël , where he glimpses the template of his future films, with the combination of numerous interviews, and his own leading role before the camera. But it will take him twelve years to complete his life’s work, for which he will always be remembered, Shoah . It is a reflection crossed by pain but serene about an abominable crime, where the perpetrators have abdicated their humanity. The nine and a half hour film traces the Chełmno extermination campaign, the Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, and the elimination of the Warsaw ghetto.

In 2013, he would assemble part of the material not used in the film in The Last of the Unjust , a long interview with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council of the Theresienstadt concentration camp and the only survivor of those who held this accursed position. In 1994 he premiered Tsahal , controversial for his vision of the Israeli army. More recently, in 2017, he was presenting Napalm , his look at the Korean War, at Cannes.