Country: Austria, France
Year: 2013
Duration: 220'
Rome, 1975: Lanzmann conducts an interview for his film Shoah with Benjamin Murmelstein, the only Jewish Elder from Theresienstadt camp who survived the Holocaust. 2012: Lanzmann reviews the footage and returns to the “city Hitler gave to Jews:” a model ghetto used as a Nazi propaganda showcase.
Biography
film director
Claude Lanzmann
Claude Lanzmann (Paris, France, 1925) is one of the greatest scholars and popularizers of the genocide of European Jews. By the time he was twenty, he fought in the French Resistance. After the war, he worked as a writer and journalist, he taught at the University of Berlin, and he became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In those years, he started writing for the magazine “Les Temps Modernes,” which he now runs as chief editor. As a film director, his nine-hour documentary Shoah (1985), which took him twelve years to make, is one of the most significant pieces of commemorative culture ever realized. In 2013 the Berlinale dedicated him a homage and awarded him the Golden Bear for his lifetime achievements. Le dernier des injustes (2013) was presented out of competition in Cannes and then at the Torino Film Festival.
FILMOGRAFIA
Pourquoi Israel (doc., 1973), Shoah (id., doc., 1985), Tsahal (doc., 1994), Un vivant qui passe (doc., 1999), Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures (Sobibor - 14 ottobre 1943, ore 16.00, doc., 2001), Lights and Shadows (cm, doc., 2008), Le rapport Karski (doc., tv, 2010), Le dernier des injustes (id., doc., 2013), Napalm (doc., 2017).
Declaration
film director
“Shoah is an epic, and the overall tone is of unremitting tragedy. When you listen to Murmelstein, you see that it doesn’t fit with that; it’s in another register. That said, he was the first protagonist we filmed. […] From Jerusalem, we had arrived in Rome with some very sophisticated camera and sound equipment, but as soon as we arrived, we were ransacked. We had to rush in some more equipment from Paris. That incident left me a bit stunned, but we still filmed for a whole week with him. It had been so difficult to make Shoah the way I did it, without commentary – the construction of the film itself generating its own intelligibility – that if I had included an episode like that, the film would have lasted 20 hours! So I decided to deal with it later, but I put it off for a long time.”
Cast
& Credits
REGIA
Claude Lanzmann
MONTAGGIO
Chantal Hymans
SUONO
Antoine Bonfanti, Manuel Grandpierre, Alexander Koller
INTERPRETI
Benjamin Murmelstein, Claude Lanzmann
PRODUTTORI
David Frenkel, Jean Labadie, Danny Krausz
PRODUZIONE
Synecdoche, Le Pacte, Dor Film, Les Films Aleph
COPRODUZIONE
France 3 Cinéma
Claude Lanzmann
MONTAGGIO
Chantal Hymans
SUONO
Antoine Bonfanti, Manuel Grandpierre, Alexander Koller
INTERPRETI
Benjamin Murmelstein, Claude Lanzmann
PRODUTTORI
David Frenkel, Jean Labadie, Danny Krausz
PRODUZIONE
Synecdoche, Le Pacte, Dor Film, Les Films Aleph
COPRODUZIONE
France 3 Cinéma
