Shoah (1985)

Good concept, poorly executed.

A Masterpiece!

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Now it's commonly used in the Hebrew language to refer to the 1940's ethnocide of the Jewish people. Different thing about Shoah is that, they didn't use any archive footage at all. It's all done through interviews with real survivors, German/allied soldiers that worked in the camps and other people who lived to tell their stories. You could literally make a separate movie from every different story you hear in this documentary.Holocaust is not an unknown topic to a lot of people but hearing some of these gruesome details from the people who experienced it first hand, gives you a completely new perspective.

I have just recently watched this film in two parts, over two weeks. Yes, it is long. So what? I find it unbelievable that people can complain about the length of this film. Did you not know how long the film was before watching it? Oh dear.. did you get a 'bit bored' by the history of the mass extinction of the Jews? Did you run out of popcorn? The whole point of the film is to document the horror and also the complicity of others, not just the Nazis. The slow pace of the film gives us time to reflect on the misery and horror. The cold bleakness of the Polish landscape and the timeless quality only enhances and evokes feelings of depression and misery. The film has had a profound effect on me. It has made me angry and sad. It has made me want to tell other people. It is doing it's job, and will continue to do so as long as it exists and people watch it.

Shoah is maybe unique as a documentary on the subject as it contains on one hand the only testimonies of lone survivors of death camps or important work units in those camps, and on the other hand it also has testimonies of actors in the execution of the final solution. It's construction makes you understand all the evolution of the process over the years from the thirties to the very end of the war. The intensity of the emotions that you sense during the interviews as are the surgical precision of certain descriptions of the horrors were for me more emotional than that felt by seeing any of the motion pictures or other documentaries on the subject.Shoah is as intense as it is long, more than 9 hours of interviews without any reenactments. But you don't need those, the testimonies leave you with vivid images that will haunt you for the rest of your life.The witnesses of this documentary are now dead, Lanzmann has made sure that their testimonies be heard for the generations to come.

I have always been interested in the Holocaust since i first learned about it in school, but its in the last couple of years i have been studying it to the point that i actually could consider myself an amateur holocaust scholar ( alt-ho that term somehow seems a bit non PC in this context ), so when i came across a 9+ hour documentary i was very intrigued as i find it problematic to find raw unedited books or films about the topic. The film offers a huge collection of first hand testimony of the atrocities that occurred during Nazi rule from both victims ,offenders and general witnesses. The interviews with the survivors is both gripping and chilling and gives you a better feel of the actual fear they must have felt in contrast to what certain other movies have been able to as they talk in detail about the actual specific things that took place. In this part of the film he ( Lanzmann ) does a great job, and thats because he lets them talk for themselves.... as for the offenders and gen.witnesses he fails and this is why;First off he seems to blend the two, that is he seems to be under the impression that as long as you where there and didn't do everything to stop it then you are an offender in the genocide, the most apparent and appalling examples of this is when he interviews some poor polish peasants from "hillbilly"-land , have them look into the camera and ask them ( and I'm paraphrasing ) " was the Jews that lived here rich ? " thus getting them to say a common antisemitic phrase "the Jews around here were rich" and then lets them stare into the camera unable to detect what just happened. This is also apparent when he asks them questions about what they witnessed ( usually someone living nearby the Reinhard camps ) and when they answer he has this way of responding with a subtle sarcastic manner that implies they didn't care what happened, even tho most of them actually did try to warn the people in the incoming trains and the like. About the offenders ( i think he talks to 2 or 3 ) i agree that i don't find much sympathy for them but Claude should just let them speak and not interrupt them and try to get them to break down as that has no relativity to the purpose of the film IMO. He constantly tells the ex Treblinka guard that he doesn't believe him, really ? , the guy sits there and willingly speaks of seeing Human feces in rows outside the gas chambers but he is somehow lying about other details ? that doesn't make any sense. I will say tho that when he talks to the guy who was one of the people in charge of the Warsaw ghetto that claims he didn't know anything, his disbelief is justified.My last problem with this film is that it not only doesn't mention the non-Jewish victims it seems to purposely avoid the subject. One particular scene comes to mind when a Pole tells a heart gripping story about a mom getting shot with her kid ( i cant remember detail ) outside the train and Lanzmann asks quickly, even interrupting, " was she Jewish ?". Does that matter ? She was a victim of the holocaust and she got shot with her kid but shes not worth remembering because she was a non-Jew ?I might seem very disappointed in this film but its actually not that bad. I just think Claude should have left himself out of the camera and let the people involved speak for them-self to the extent that it is possible.Great collection of very important history but , but with some serious issues