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Director Claude Lanzmann died Thursday at the age of 92. A scholar and scholar, Claude Lanzmann was equally at ease as an author, filmmaker, memoirist, journalist and speaker. His best-known film, "Shoah", was an unshakeable testimony of the Holocaust through the testimony of Jewish victims, German executioners and Polish pbaders-by.
In the mid-1970s, Lanzmann began working on an oral history of the Holocaust, conducting a series of interviews with survivors, perpetrators and witnesses of the six million murder of Jews by the Nazis. In all he spent 11 years doing "Shoah", a film that defined the Holocaust for those who saw him, and defined him as a filmmaker.
The film's power is to consider the Holocaust as a present event rather than a story. It contained no archive footage, no musical score – just landscapes, trains and memories told. President Reuven Rivlin described "Shoah" as a film that "changed the perspective of the world."
"I knew that the subject of the film would be death itself.
Claude Lanzmann (Photo: AP)
More than nine hours long, the film met a wide critical acclaim. At the premiere of the film, French journalist Jean Daniel told the filmmaker: "This justifies a life". The film critic Roger Ebert called it "one of the noblest films ever made" and Time Out and The Guardian were among those who ranked it as the greatest documentary of all time.
Born in 1925 to a Jewish family who had emigrated from Eastern Europe, Lanzmann reached the age of the Nazi occupation in France and served with the resistance.
A contemporary of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Lanzmann joins Sartre's circle and maintains an affair with Beauvoir, Sartre's companion. He then left for Israel and moved in with Beauvoir on his return to Paris from 1952 to 1959. Sartre, Lanzmann's hero, became a constant in their life together.
"I was therefore an opportunist -" do it to me ", but she was beautiful, my attraction to her was sincere," he once said to Beauvoir's biographer. Long after the end of their affair, Beauvoir provided much of the financial support for "Shoah". Beauvoir, writing about Lanzmann in his memoir "Force of Circumstance," described him as someone who "seemed to carry the weight of an entire ancestral experience on his shoulders".
Claude Lanzmann (Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto / GettyimagesIL)
Lanzmann tinkers in politics and journalism, working periodically for the magazine France Dimanche. In 1968, he made a television report about the Israeli army in the Sinai Peninsula, which led to his first film, "Israel, why".
In 2009, Lanzmann published his autobiography, "The Patagonian Hare", which traces his youth, the impact of Nazism on his life's relationship with de Beauvoir.
In 2013, Lanzmann revisited the Holocaust with "The Last of the Unjust", focusing on his talks in 1975 with a Viennese rabbi who was the last "old" of the Theresienstadt ghetto.
The Last of the Unjust, 2013 – Trailer
He received the Legion of Honor, the highest order of merit from France, for his work in 2006, and continued his work as editor of Modern Times in his 90s.
His last work, a series of interviews with four Holocaust survivors gathered in a single film of four and a half hours, was released in French theaters Wednesday.
"Claude Lanzmann's cinematographic work left an indelible mark on the collective memory and shaped the perception of viewers around the world, in these generations and in others … his departure from us Now, with our recent separation of many Holocaust survivors mark the end of an era, "said Avner Shalev, president of Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem.
Lanzmann is survived by his third wife, Dominique, and his daughter Angélique. His son Felix died of cancer in 2017, at the age of 23 years.
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