Claude Lanzmann, director of the Holocaust, died at 92

I still have a hard time believing that Claude Lanzmann, the best – known French writer and filmmaker for Shoah his 9 ½ – hour documentary, tells the story. history of the extermination of the European Jewish community during the Second World War – died on July 5 in Paris. Yes, he was 92, but he was still energetically alarming, having released two films in the past two years. For the first, Napalm (2016), he traveled to North Korea to tell the story of a romantic interlude that he had shared with a Korean nurse in the years 1950. "We all badumed that he was indestructible", said yesterday a Frenchman, a friend and an initiate of the cinema,

Here is a man so obsessed with death that his extraordinary memory, The Patagonian Hare (published here in 2012), begins with a long mediation on the guillotine, whose fear had preoccupied him for decades, though, he writes regretfully (and with precision), "I do not have a neck". to consider tourniquets, platoons of execution, and other forms and examples of capital punishment, prison executions at the dawn of insurgents during the Algerian War of Independence at the The obscenity of the beheading of a captive in a video of ISIS. But it turns out that an existentialist thinking about death is not an insurance against his coming for you.

When someone dies at age 92, leaving behind a great and singular heritage, it's not entirely logical to think that he is not. I just, that he could have lived another ten years. But since yesterday I have been inconsolable.

What I miss is the shock that Lanzmann's presence in my life has provided, both through his work and a friendship that has lasted nearly three decades. The shaking was not always pleasant; if the job was demanding, the man could be too. But the rewards, in both cases, were immeasurable. Shoah his second film, which I saw the summer that he opened in 1985, during two days in a small cinema on the left bank in Paris, has changed my life. It also marks a turning point in the cinema and in our understanding of the crimes against humanity of the 20th century.

Born in 1925, the eldest of three children of French Jews with roots in Eastern Europe, Lanzmann first experienced anti-Semitism in the world. 1930 at the school in Paris. During the war, when he was still a teenager, he organized a Resistance cell in his boarding school in Clermont-Ferrand, helping to get weapons and ammunition to the opponents of the Nazi occupiers. His political commitments continued after the war when, while working as a journalist and ally with the philosopher / writer Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he joined their protests and was indicted for his support of the Algerian Revolution.

film, the documentary of more than three hours, Why Israel (1973), a portrait of the Jewish state, appeared as an answer to a special issue of the magazine The Modern Times that he edited with Sartre on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lanzmann found that he could not think of Israel in the same anticolonial terms that had defined his own responses and those of his leftist friends to the French presence in Algeria.

Shoah began as a 1973 commission of the Israeli government for a two-hour film on the Holocaust, told "from the Jewish point of view". When the research extended well beyond the initial 18 months, the Israelis withdrew their support. Lanzmann spent more than eleven years reading, interviewing and filming more than 350 hours of raw footage. Traveling to fourteen countries, he sought out survivors, eyewitnesses and executioners – Polish peasants, Nazi officials, Jews forced to work in the gas chambers, survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising – and forced to testify. the case of a former SS officer and guard at Treblinka) filming them in secret

At that time, France was still far from recognizing its role in the roundup and deportation of French Jews. The writers Jean Amery, Primo Levi and Eli Weisel wrote fascinating accounts of their experiences in the death camps; but most of the survivors were silent, still working under the oppressive weight of the trauma and indifference of the world. The Holocaust has not been widely taught in schools.

Without recourse to archives or documents, Shoah uses the most minimal means; a single camera focused on the human face, with emotions flying through it; the voices of the witnesses, colored by their hesitations, pauses and trial and error; and the desolate visual poetry of the no man's land abandoned in Poland, places of mbad executions, to produce one of the greatest "special effects" of the history of cinema. She brings the dead and their journey to life in our imaginations.

The professional barber and former prisoner of Treblinka, Abraham Bomba, interviewed while cutting a woman's hair in a barbershop in Tel Aviv, recounts that he was giving slices of hair to women. rooms, minutes before the women (said they were about to take a shower) would be killed there. (The Nazis sent their hair to be used in Germany.) Bomba begins to talk about the time when a transport from his village has arrived, but then it is too painful, and he 's sure he' s not going to talk about it. stopped. Lanzmann obliges him to continue, and we learn that this time, he was forced to cut the hair of his wife and sister, only able to share a brief hug with them before leaving them to death.

This exchange between witness and filmmaker is not particularly compbadionate or gentle. But Lanzmann's requirement is that of history; he wants us to understand, as far as possible, the human cost of survival under the machine of the Nazi death.

This awareness is also bringing lessons for us today. The railroad tracks that take us, during the nine hours of the film, towards Auschwitz, also lead us through time, to a predictable conclusion (death) that most of us, at the everyday, choose to forget. Lanzmann is now here before us.

The fact that he was in love with life and obsessed with death was only the most obvious of his many contradictions. He was profoundly Jewish and deeply secular. He worked with the past but was relentlessly engaged with the present. A polemist sometimes violent, it could also be very funny. He was the only man with whom Simone de Beauvoir lived, during their nine-year love story and friendship that lasted until his death in 1986. But he was, I believe, sure, not feminist; he was known to share the alarming machismo of his generation. He believed in freedom.

In addition to the works mentioned above, he leaves behind seven feature films. A Visitor of the Living (1999), Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 pm (2001), and The Last of the Unjust (2013), were all fashioned from Shoah Falls, although this latter film also included new images. He also leaves behind a woman and a girl. His 23 year old son, Felix, died of cancer last year. Lanzmann's latest film, The Four Sisters – also based on interviews that he recorded more than 40 years earlier and which opened in Paris this week – is dedicated to him .