Documentary · History
French
1985 · Directed by Claude Lanzmann · 566 min
Claude Lanzmann spent years travelling to Poland, Israel, Germany and elsewhere to film the people who lived beside, suffered inside, or carried out the destruction of Europe's Jews. The film uses no archive images: only voices, faces, and the quiet landscapes where it happened. It asks for patience and gives something rare in return.
Why it matters in cinema history
A landmark of the documentary form and of film as testimony, it reset the terms for how cinema could represent atrocity, by asking whether it should show it at all.
Watch with intention
Watch it as a film about speech: who speaks, how, in what language, and what the camera does while words are being found.
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