Review of Shoah (1985) by Kenneth L — 15 Oct 2011

Well, after years of trying to track down a copy of it, I can finally say I've watched this movie - all 9 and a half hours of it. This is the longest movie I've ever seen, and so unlike anything else that reviewing it is basically impossible. I can really just describe it.

This movie is a documentary about the Holocaust. It doesn't use any archival footage from the actual event. Rather, Claude Lanzmann, the film's director, spent years (mostly in the 1970s, I think) tracking down people who were somehow involved in the Holocaust and interviewing them about what happened. Mostly he interviews Jewish survivors of the camps, but he also spends quite a lot of time talking to bystanders (mostly Poles) and former Nazis, both soldiers and bureaucrats. He also talks a good bit to a historian who is an expert on the Holocaust. The movie consists almost entirely of either unbroken shots of these people talking, or long tracking shots around the sites of concentration camps or similar places while we hear people talk about what happened there. Lanzmann just keeps asking people the most detailed and matter-of-fact questions about precisely how things happened.

Watching this movie is quite an undertaking - at 9 and a half hours, it takes longer to get through than some novels take to read. What do you get out of it? Well, you'll probably learn specific things about the Holocaust that you didn't know. I had taken a class on the subject (admittedly, an English class, not a history class), and it still had details I hadn't heard before. More, though, you just see how the survivors and the former perpetrators live on, and how it variously continues to affect them. The movie is too much to fully process, even if you watch it over the course of three weeks like I did. It's probably the single most valuable document of the Holocaust and its aftereffects. And that's all I have to say about that.