Review of Shoah (1985) by Joey D — 07 Jan 2010

"Shoah" is one film that I will never forget having seen. It contains some of the most real, heartfelt footage ever captured on film and creates a more accurate account of the events that composed the Holocaust than any other film has ever dreamed of doing. In its epic 9-1/2-hour length, the interviews with survivors, ex-Nazis, and bystanders are juxtaposed with long panning shots of the now-empty death camps and of the towns and countrysides in which the horrors took place. There is not a single moment in this film that is wasted. Not one sequence seems superfluous or gratuitous, and every image seen and word spoken will hold your attention until the end.

Claude Lanzmann perfectly executes his vision and his motives with each shot and with each question he asks of the film's participants. He gently but persistently keeps his interviewees going despite their reluctance at times to continue to remember the horrors of their pasts. He does not rely on voice-over narration or any sort of background score to make the audience feel any particular way. This is a case where the footage really speaks for itself. To call this kind of meticulous precision admirable would not be giving it enough praise. Lanzmann is a genius.

"Shoah" is so powerful and so unlike anything that I've ever seen that I don't even want to refer to it as a film. I think that it should be thought of as an experience or a journey into the lives of the people that it depicts. This really is the definitive documentation of the Holocaust, and if you ever want to learn what things were really like on all sides of the situation at purely human and emotional levels, then this is one film that you simply cannot miss. While it may be laden with tale after tale of death and horrendous inhumanity, the underlying presence of the resilience of human life is as strong as any of the other elements mentioned, and the survivors and their stories are the literal "living" proof of that.

It is almost unimaginable that human beings were capable of doing these things to other human beings, and that those that did not actually murder anyone but knew about it could stand by and let it happen. Evil endures when people tolerate it, and never in modern history has it been more apparent.

The most important thing that one can take from seeing something like this is not only to understand the magnitude and seriousness of what happened all those years ago, but also to make sure that something like this never happens again.