Shoah
1985 Directed by Claude Lanzmann
Synopsis
Claude Lanzmann directed this 9 1/2 hour documentary of the Holocaust without using a single frame of archive footage. He interviews survivors, witnesses, and ex-Nazis (whom he had to film secretly since though only agreed to be interviewed by audio). His style of interviewing by asking for the most minute details is effective at adding up these details to give a horrifying portrait of the events of Nazi genocide. He also shows, or rather lets some of his subjects themselves show, that the anti-Semitism that caused 6 million Jews to die in the Holocaust is still alive in well in many people that still live in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere.
Genre
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Over 9 hours long, this is hard to describe in any way whatsoever.
But of course this is the definitive work on the Holocaust. You can get quite a sense of what it was all about by watching documentaries like Nuit et brouillard and Shtikat Haarchion, or even fictionalized films like Schindler's List and The Pianist. But here I found that it really came true in the deepest, most unnerving sense.This is an ordeal to get through. I have to admit - a little bit also due to the editing. Lanzmann, when in need of a translator to perform his interviews, decided to include also the translator into the film. So, we first hear Lanzmann's questions in French or…
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Might just be the best documentary ever made. Worth the 9 hours and then some of your life. Beautifully filmed and extremely moving.
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This film is an ordeal. But a necessary one. There is no footage of concentration camps, no stacked corpses, just testimony from survivors and footage of the concentration camps years later, with hardly any traces of the horrors that were once so evident. This is a film about motion, be it the movement of trains full with Jews across Europe or the movement of the six million Jews heading towards the gas chambers. It is as you would expect a sad and often harrowing film. One that should be seen by anyone with an interest in how humanity can be so lost, nonetheless I do not think I could put myself through it again.
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The pain inflicted on many of these tormented souls is just to much for me to bear. I cried my very first tear over a film watching this...
Top 3 documentaries I've seen.
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It took me four days to watch this through. First of all, it's long, and second, it's very exhausting. Necessary, but tough watch.
I like the matter-of-fact atmosphere in it. Things are stated just as they are, how the people are telling them, without underlining their statements or showing long bits of archive footage. If you want to see that, this is not your movie. If you want to see how the people were doing after the war, it sure is worth a watch.
Several survivors are interviewed, also some of the camp guards or other personnel, and the civil people who lived around the camps. They all have a story to tell, and sometimes their point of views offer chillingly opposing opinions.
It is a heavy document of one of the darkest periods of mankind. Holocaust must not be forgotten, so that the history would not repeat itself.
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I have never been left feeling so exhausted – physically and emotionally – by a single film. Shoah is a torrent of words, and those words conjure images capable of breaking the heart many times over. Read more: mostlyfilm.com/2011/07/21/looking-back-into-darkness-claude-lanzmann%E2%80%99s-shoah/
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Stop everything and go see this documentary. It is a moral obligation.
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This has been something I've put off watching for a long time, the sheer length, clocking in at 550 minutes (the Criterion cut) was offputting but after three days I finally made it through and I was left incredibly moved.
Walking in I thought I was comfortably aware of the horrors of Nazi occupied Germany, or at least I thought I was - I agree with Mr Ebert who said Shoah " was an extraordinary film. It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness."
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It is difficult to discuss this film as a "film". It acts more as a monument; presenting first had accounts of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews.
Each interview reveals a dimension to the genocide that is hard to imagine. It provides details that most of us have never considered, and provides horrifying insight into the pure industrialisation of mass slaughter.
I take away from this documentary less the numbers, which are well known, but the stories. It is the story of the barber who shaved the heads of thousands of waiting victims, who prevented himself from giving them warning knowing that it was a fruitless exercise given the certainty of death.
It is the recounted story…
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Worst date night movie ever
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The pain inflicted on many of these tormented souls is just to much for me to bear. I cried my very first tear over a film watching this...
Top 3 documentaries I've seen.
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99/100
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Over 9 hours long, this is hard to describe in any way whatsoever.
But of course this is the definitive work on the Holocaust. You can get quite a sense of what it was all about by watching documentaries like Nuit et brouillard and Shtikat Haarchion, or even fictionalized films like Schindler's List and The Pianist. But here I found that it really came true in the deepest, most unnerving sense.This is an ordeal to get through. I have to admit - a little bit also due to the editing. Lanzmann, when in need of a translator to perform his interviews, decided to include also the translator into the film. So, we first hear Lanzmann's questions in French or…
-
It took me four days to watch this through. First of all, it's long, and second, it's very exhausting. Necessary, but tough watch.
I like the matter-of-fact atmosphere in it. Things are stated just as they are, how the people are telling them, without underlining their statements or showing long bits of archive footage. If you want to see that, this is not your movie. If you want to see how the people were doing after the war, it sure is worth a watch.
Several survivors are interviewed, also some of the camp guards or other personnel, and the civil people who lived around the camps. They all have a story to tell, and sometimes their point of views offer chillingly opposing opinions.
It is a heavy document of one of the darkest periods of mankind. Holocaust must not be forgotten, so that the history would not repeat itself.
-
Might just be the best documentary ever made. Worth the 9 hours and then some of your life. Beautifully filmed and extremely moving.