12 - Shoah

Summary

Claude Lanzmann began work on Shoah in 1973 and didn’t complete it until twelve years later. The film was shaped in part by events that happened as it was being shot: a spate of trials that placed in the dock perpetrators of the Final Solution in France, the emergence of a movement of Holocaust-deniers or negationists, and the airing on French TV in 1979 of the American “docudrama” Holocaust. Lanzmann shaped a movie that in form and substance defined itself in reaction to these developments, crystallizing in the process a particular, French understanding of the Final Solution as a unique and unprecedented event, not about survival and reconstruction, but about death in the gas chambers of the Aktion Reinhard Vernicthungslagers. Lanzmann wanted to create a film that denied viewers catharsis or consolation, and in the process, he gave the genocide a new name, Shoah, which has since gained currency in France and elsewhere.