Lanzmann, director of
FRENCH filmmaker and writer Claude Lanzmann, whose landmark 1985 documentary Shoah revealed the horrors of the Holocaust over nine hours of chilling eyewitness accounts, died in Paris on Thursday aged 92.
“Claude Lanzmann died at his home. He had been very, very weak for several days” following a recent hospitalisation for fatigue, a spokeswoman for his publishing house Gallimard said.
Lanzmann had worked constantly since the 1972 release of his first film, Israel, Why, often taking chapters of his own life as inspiration.
Last year, for example, he presented at the Cannes film festival Napalm, about his brief but intense romance with a North Korean nurse in 1958.
And his last film, The Four Sisters, was released in French cinemas just this week.
But it was the 1985 release of Shoah” (the Hebrew word for “calamity” often used for the Holocaust), widely considered the most haunting film made about the murder of six million Jews during World War II, which propelled him to global acclaim.
The groundbreaking nine and a half-hour work consists largely of interviews with survivors and witnesses of Nazi death camps in Poland, including camp workers, alongside shots of sites where the horrors occurred.
Lanzmann spent 12 years working on the film, compiling 350 hours of footage, much of which would be used for his later films on the Holocaust.
Many of the scenes remain hard to watch, including one of a man tearfully recounting how he had to cut the hair of women just before they entered a gas chamber, unable to tell them what awaited on pain of being sent in with them.
Lanzmann spent years tracking down the man, eventually finding him in Israel.
“If I am unstoppable it’s because of the truth, which I believe in profoundly,” he said in an AFP interview last year.
Romance with Beauvoir
Lanzmann, the grandson of Jews from Belarus, was born on November 27, 1925, in the Paris suburb of Bois-Colombes. His father was a decorator and his mother an antiques dealer.
In 1940 his father brought him and his brother and sister to Brioude, a remote village in the south-central region of Auvergne, where he taught them how to hide and make a quick escape.
“Through the branches we could see his SS boots and heard the anguished voice of a Jewish father: ‘You moved, you made noise!’” Lanzmann wrote in his 2009 autobiography, The Patagonian Hare.
He was also unsparing with himself, telling of his “cowardice” for not standing up for a red-haired classmate suffering