Shoah (1985)
Les Films Aleph

Description

SHOAH is a magical film about the most barbaric act of the 20th century. Previous commentaries on the Holocaust, with its ravished skeletons and corpses, have left us shaken, but now for the first time, we experience it in our heads, in our flesh.

Claude Lanzmann spent eleven years spanning the globe for surviving camp inmates, SS commandants, and eyewitnesses of the Final Solution-the Nazi's effort to systematically exterminate human beings. without dramatic enactment or archival footage, but with extraordinary testimonies, SHOAH renders the step-by-step machinery of extermination: the minutiae of timetables and finances, the logistics of herding victims into the gas chambers and disposing of the corpses afterward, the bureaucratic procedures which expedited the killing of millions of people without mentioning the words "killing" or "people". Through haunted landscapes and human voice, the past comes brilliantly alive.

SHOAH is a heroic endeavor to humanize the inhuman, to tell the untellable. It is an immensely disturbing, even shattering experience, yet in its solemnity and beauty not a morbid or disheartening one. There are few works of art which leave one with such a deep appreciation for the preciousness and meaning of life.

Tags

World War II

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Amazon user reviews

To write a review of a film such as Shoah seems an impossible task: how to sum up one of the most powerful discourses on film in such a way as to make people realize that this is a documentary of immense consequence, a documentary that is not easy to watch but important to watch, a documentary that not only records the facts, but bears witness. We are commanded "Never forget"; this film helps us to fulfill that mandate, reverberating with the viewer long after the movie has ended.
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10 Chicago Sun-Times | Rober Ebert

There is no proper response to this film. It is an enormous fact, a 550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide. It is one of the noblest films ever made.
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10 New York Times | Richard Bernstein

Mr. Lanzmann, who has refused to make a shortened version of ''Shoah,'' believes that the film contains not one unnecessary frame, and he likes to say that each minute was edited as carefully as though the entire film would last only that one minute.
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10 Combustible Celluloid | Jeffrey M. Anderson

Lanzmann doesn't try to understand what happened; he just collects details. It's impossible to know just how horrible conditions really were, but listening to these stories of sights, sounds and smells can break your heart.
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10 DVD Talk | Gil Jawetz

With the world as unstable as it is today, with madmen commanding rabid followings, Shoah feels prevalent and modern. The lessons it teaches and the questions it can't answer apply to all our lives. The suffering on display will always be current and Lanzmann's film does as much as it can to make sure it's never forgotten.
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10 DVD Outsider | Camus

The experience of seeing Shoah as an artistic work is in the eye of the beholder. Lanzmann is against the interpretation of it merely being an historical document and it is by no means merely that but the subject forces one into setting out on that road.
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10 DVD Verdict | Joel Pearce

We have a responsibility to bear witness to what happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust. This is only a small piece of that, but it is full of truth. Watch it.
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8.3 Old School Reviews | John Nesbit

Shoah relentlessly uncovers facets that viewers will never forget, posing questions about just what it means to be a human being in this crazy universe. This may prove too intense for children and for most adults, but could still be one of the most important films that you'll ever experience—and the word "experience" is key, as I know that I'll never look at the Holocaust as "objectively" again.
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7.0 Slant Magazine | Ed Gonzalez

Though Claude Lanzmann's seminal Shoah catalogs one of the most horrifying events in the history of the world, it remains one of the most life-affirming works of art ever produced for the cinema.
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