Shoah

4.5

Documentary

History

1985

566 min

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 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.

Starring:

Documentary

8.7/10

97%

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"Part one: I’m still working my way through this epic of a documentary, and the first thing I notice is that my own PTSD reactions are reacting to the PTSD reactions of these survivors: I keep dissociating out for some periods of time, and coming back to myself during the next sequence of interviews. The visual shots only add to this in smoky dreamlike unreality. The stories are horrifying, and also horribly logical in the ultimate aims of fascist thinking: depersonalizing corpses, burying then digging up and burning evidence, destroying cemeteries. I’ll be adding to this review in parts as I keep working my steady way through this nine-hour saga. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for these people to retrigger themselves for our education and benefit, and I am doing my best to honor that psychological sacrifice."