BAMcinématek Presents: Shoah

Part of BAMcinématek

Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 1pm
Screens with two 15-minute breaks
Book signing with Lanzmann at 6pm one-hour break

Directed by Claude Lanzmann 

(1985) 564min, 35mm

“The greatest documentary about contemporary history ever made.”—Marcel Ophüls

Twelve years in the making, Lanzmann’s monumental epic on the Holocaust features interviews with survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators without a snippet of archival footage. Growing out of Lanzmann’s concern that the genocide was already retreating into the mists of time, and that the atrocity was becoming sanitized as History, his massive achievement—at once epic and intimate, immediate and definitive—is a triumph of form and content that reveals hidden truths while rewriting the rules of documentary filmmaking.

Claude Lanzmann will be signing copies of his book The Patagonian Hare, published in France in 2009 and recently translated into English. The memoir recounts Lanzmann's life in France and Europe during the second half of the 20th Century—from the French resistance movement during World War II to training Israeli F16 fighter jets in the 1990s; from his friendship with Jean Paul Sartre and love affair with Simone de Beauvoir to the making of his groundbreaking documentary Shoah. The Patagonian Hare is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.