Shoah director Claude Lanzmann, aged 92

French film director Claude Lanzmann, whose nine-and-a-halfhour masterpiece Shoah bore unflinching witness to the Holocaust through the testimonies of Jewish victims and German executioners, has died at the age of 92.

Gallimard, the publishing house for Mr Lanzmann’s autobiography, said he died on Thursday morning at a Paris hospital.

Shoah, which was filmed in the 1970 s during Mr Lanzmann’ s trips to the barren Polish landscapes where the slaughter of Jews took place, viewed the Holocaust as an event in the present, rather than as history.

It contained no archival footage and no musical score – just the landscape, trains and people’s recounted memories.

Mr Lanzmann was 59 when the movie, his second, came out in 1985. It defined the Holocaust for those who saw it, and defined him as a filmmaker.

Shoah was almost universally praised. US critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the noblest films ever made”, and Time Out and The Guardian ranked it the greatest documentary of all time.

His final film in 2017, Napalm, was a narrative of his visit to North Korea in the 1950s.

Mr Lanzmann was born on November 27 1925 in Paris, the child of French Jews. He joined the Resistance as a Communist and became intellectually enamoured with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose Anti-Semite And Jew formed the philosophical underpinning of what would later be his life’s work.

Claude Lanzmann.