Shoah (1985)
About This Movie
Claude Lanzmann spent eleven years making a nine and a half hour documentary about the Holocaust that uses no archival footage whatsoever, relying entirely on interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders, and on the present day landscapes where the extermination camps once operated. The result is not a history lesson but an act of witnessing so immersive and relentless that it changes how you understand what happened.
Why It's a Classic
Lanzmann's refusal to use archival images was a radical artistic and moral decision: he believed that the familiar photographs and film clips of the camps had become so ubiquitous that they risked turning genocide into an abstraction, something that happened in grainy black and white to people who do not look like us. By filming the present day sites, Birkenau's fields, Treblinka's stones, the quiet Polish villages where deportation trains stopped, Lanzmann forces the viewer to confront the gap between the tranquil surfaces and the horror they conceal. The interviews are extraordinary feats of endurance: Abraham Bomba, a barber forced to cut women's hair in the gas chambers, breaks down mid sentence while cutting hair in a barbershop, and Lanzmann gently, insistently asks him to continue. The perpetrators, filmed with hidden cameras in some cases, describe the mechanics of murder with a matter of factness that is more chilling than any dramatization. The film's length is not a flaw but an essential element; you must submit to its duration as the people it documents were forced to submit to theirs.
Fun Fact
Lanzmann filmed over 350 hours of interviews across fourteen countries over eleven years. Several perpetrators were filmed with hidden cameras because they would not have spoken openly otherwise. The interview with SS officer Franz Suchomel, who describes the workings of Treblinka while believing the camera is off, is among the most disturbing footage ever recorded. Lanzmann deliberately avoided the word 'Holocaust' in the title, choosing instead the Hebrew word 'Shoah,' meaning catastrophe or destruction, because he felt it was less reductive.
Parent Note
The film contains no graphic imagery of the Holocaust, but the verbal descriptions of extermination are extremely detailed and harrowing. Survivors recount experiences of unimaginable suffering, and some break down during interviews. The nine and a half hour running time requires significant commitment (the film is typically shown in two parts). In multiple languages with subtitles. No rating. This is one of the most important films ever made, but it demands emotional maturity and preparation. Best viewed by adults or older teens with strong historical grounding.
Quick Facts
- Year
- 1985
- Type
- 🎬 Movie
- Category
- Documentary
- Age Group
- Adults (Ages 18+)