Happy Birthday, Claude Lanzmann! Born today in 1925, this French journalist, author, producer and film director was also an epic chronicler of the Holocaust.
Born in Bois-Colombes, Hauts-de-Seine, France, Lanzmann was the son of a Jewish family of whom had immigrated to France from Eastern Europe.
Lanzmann was the older brother of French journalist, writer and lyricist Jacques Lanzmann and French actress and director Evelyne Ray.
Ray is most notable for appearing in Jean-Pierre Melville's ('Le Samouraï') 1956 French black and white crime/heist film 'Bob le Flambeur' ('Bob the Gambler').
While Lanzmann's family disguised their identity and went into hiding during World War II, he joined the French resistance at the age of seventeen, along with his father and brother, and fought in Auvergne.
Lanzmann later opposed the French war in Algeria and signed the 1960 anti-war petition Manifesto of the 121. This was an open letter signed by one hundred and twenty-one intellectuals and published on September 6, 1960 in the magazine Vérité-Liberté.
In 1952, he became partners and lived with Simone de Beauvoir, of whom had co-founded the French journal Les Temps modernes. This was after Lanzmann had become the chief editor.
The two both remained romantically involved for seven years until they went their separate ways in 1959.
Aside from de Beauvoir, Lanzmann was also longtime friends with the other co-creator of Les Temps modernes. This was French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic Jean-Paul Sartre.
Four years later, Lanzmann married his first wife, French actress Judith Magre in 1963. They were divorced eight years later in 1971.
Later that same year, Lanzmann married his second wife, German writer and actress Angelika Schrobsdorff.
Lanzmann's most renowned work is in writing and directing the groundbreaking ten-hour 1985 French documentary/war film 'Shoah'. This epic oral history of the Holocaust is broadly considered to be the foremost film on the subject.
The documentary is concerned chiefly with four topics: the Chełmno extermination camp, where mobile gas vans were first used by Germans to exterminate Jews; the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau; and the Warsaw ghetto, with testimonies from survivors, witnesses and perpetrators.
Beginning his journey in 1973, Lanzmann had spent eleven years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage.
Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories -- survivors, bystanders and perpetrators -- Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.
During the length of the film, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them.
His intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming opus is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present. Inarguably, 'Shoah' is one of the most important cinematic works of all time.
'Shoah' uses only first-person testimony from perpetrators and victims, and contemporary footage of Holocaust-related sites.
Notable interviewees include the Polish resistance-fighter soldier Jan Karski and Austrian-born Jewish-American political scientist and historian Raul Hilberg.
In 'Shoah', Lanzmann disagreed, sometimes angrily, with attempts to understand the why of Adolf Hitler, stating that the evil of the former dictator cannot or should not be explained and that to do so is immoral and an obscenity.
'Shoah' is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis.
In December 2010, Roger Ebert wrote the following: "For more than nine hours I sat and watched a film named "Shoah," and when it was over, I sat for a while longer and simply stared into space, trying to understand my emotions.
I had seen a memory of the most debased chapter in human history. But I had also seen a film that affirmed life so passionately that I did not know where to turn with my confused feelings.
There is no proper response to this film. It is an enormous fact, a 550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide. It is one of the noblest films ever made."
Ebert had described 'Shoah' as "an extraordinary film" and "one of the noblest films ever made".
He also wrote "It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness.
In it, Claude Lanzmann celebrates the priceless gift that sets man apart from animals and makes us human, and gives us hope: the ability for one generation to tell the next what it has learned."
When 'Shoah' was released, Lanzmann also published the complete text, including in English translation, with introductions by him and also Beauvoir.
Three years after the release of 'Shoah', Lanzmann appeared (this time as an interviewee) in Marcel Ophüls' ('The Sorrow and the Pity') 1988 French documentary/war film 'Hôtel Terminus: Klaus Barbie, sa vie et son temps' ('Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie').
In 1995, Lanzmann married his third and final wife, Dominique Petithory. She would remain married to Lanzmann until his death.
In 2011, Lanzmann published his autobiography under the title Le lièvre de Patagonie (The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir).
"Even if I lived a hundred lives, I still wouldn't be exhausted." These words capture the intensity of the experiences of Lanzmann, a man whose acts have always been a negation of resignation.
The book tells the story of a man who has searched at every moment for existential adventure, who has committed himself deeply to what he believes in, and who has made his life a battle.
In February 2013, Lanzmann received the Honorary Golden Bear for 'Lifetime Achievement'. This occurred at the 63rd Berlin Film Festival. It was the first time that a documentary filmmaker received this honor from the Berlinale.
In June 2014, Gene Siskel wrote: "Shoah is the greatest use of film in motion picture history, taking movies to their highest moral value.
For what director/interviewer Lanzmann has done on film is nothing less than revive history, a history so ugly that many would prefer to forget."
The following year, British filmmaker and journalist Adam Benzine wrote and directed the fifty-eight-minute 2015 American/German/British/Canadian documentary/short film 'Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah'.
The documentary explores the twelve-year journey undertaken by Lanzmann to make `Shoah'.
Benzine later received critical appraisal and widespread acclaim for his documentary. The following year, it aired on HBO in May 2016.
One year later, Lanzmann's latest work, the four-part 2017 French history documentary television miniseries "Les Quatre Soeurs" ("Shoah: Four Sisters") was released. It featured testimonials from four Holocaust survivors not included in 'Shoah'.
This was Lanzmann's final film, and a continuation of 'Shoah'. Shot in the 1970s, it recounts the experiences of four women who survived the Holocaust.
First airing in January 2018, 'Shoah: Four Sisters' chronicles the lives of four women who escaped the concentration camps and tried to find a life after the Holocaust.
For the documentary, Lanzman traveled around four Eastern European countries and interviewed and got accounts from four separate women.
In May of that same year, Lanzmann wrote, directed and starred in his 2017 French documentary film 'Napalm'.
It tells of how, in 1958, a French member of a delegation to North Korea meets a nurse working for the Korean Red Cross.
'Napalm' was based off of Lanzmann's own memoir. The documentary was later nominated for the Golden Eye documentary prize at the 70th Cannes Film Festival that same month.
The following year, Lanzmann passed in Paris, France on July 5, 2018. He was 92.
Lanzmann’s films are not easy to watch. They have a rigorous investigative drive which is totally engaging.
The boy of whom was hiding in France became the man who tracked down those who made him run – Lanzmann wanted to show the world that “one is responsible for what one does.”
Lanzmann had been active from 1970–2018.
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