Critics reviews

Perhaps one of the most haunting films, precisely because it doesn’t show anything. It can’t. It is a post-trauma film, a film that is visually set in the time after the traumatic event occurred, but where the monologues position us inside the traumatic event itself.

One of the most remarkable passages in the film is a bravura 20-minute sequence, set inside a Tel Aviv barbershop, where Abraham Bomba... describes his personal anguish of having to cut the hair of women, many from his own hometown, just before they were sent to the gas chambers. The mirrored space, which constantly changes Bomba's relationship to the camera, the shifting angles of the perspective and staging are crucial to the scene's overwhelming dramatic power and intensity.

Shoah is an angry landmark of demystification, an invaluable refute to more conventional works that seek to contain the atrocities of the Holocaust with reassuring implications of its freakish irrationality. Director Claude Lanzmann often distinguishes himself from many documentarians in fashions that are so quiet as to be nearly taken for granted.

Sure, Shoah is a great movie. It's also a terrible fate, an absolute isolation, the stones in your passway, the abyss beneath your feet, the cop at your door, the iceberg that sank the Titanic, the sign Dante placed at the Gate of Hell, the being of nothingness, the dream you can never recall. You can see Shoah and even if you forget it you'll never stop thinking about it because Shoah is.

it seems perverse to enumerate the great formal achievements of Lanzmann's masterpiece--the jarring transitions between objective and subjective filmmaking, the astonishing close-up photography, the epic tracking shots of barren fields that force the viewer to recreate death camps in his/her imagination, and, most notably, its refusal to depict the extermination of European Jewry with any archival footage--yet they are essential to its achievement as history.

Lanzmann doesn't have time for theory or tricks—Shoah is a big, blunt instrument wielded with an unwavering respect for history that takes an unlikely path to an empathetic, humanist, and quite-near holistic portraiture. For such a dire subject, it's quite often an exhilarating experience. It may be worth saying after all: Shoah is one of the best nonfiction films—if not thebest—ever made.

The same questions are repeated like an insistent refrain, the effect is relentless and cumulative. One word of caution as you watch the witnesses giving testimony; bear in mind Schiller's observation that 'individual testimony has a specific place in history but doesn't, alone, add up to it'.

At times, it doesn't feel as if [Lanzmann is] pulling information from them that they haven't before revealed. At the same time, the interviewees seem to have told, retold and relived the stories until they have moved from the realm of impression and personal memory into something as concrete as a historical fact, and in that process, the movie mines genuine conflict from the symbiotic processes of healing and forgetting.

There's an overwhelming sense here that nature itself has yet to recover from Hitler's slaughter. Rather than use photographs of concentration camps, Lanzmann contends himself with elegiac shots of what remains of these houses of death (mostly skeletal foundations) in the modern world. Every anecdote in the film speaks for itself as a melancholic celebration of Jewish perseverance and an affront to any number of Nazi pathologies and rituals of denial.

What the witnesses have to say – the victims, that is: the functionaries have never previously been tricked into quite such unguarded public reminiscence – has been heard before, but not in quite this way or with quite this impact.

In searching for the most vivid possible presentation of his subject, Lanzmann has been led to reinvent many of the principles of modernist and structuralist filmmaking, which here acquire a new kind of nonacademic urgency and justness. More than a treatment of a great subject, the film itself is a great achievement in form.