Claude Lanzmann, director of the revolutionary film Shoah on the Holocaust, died at 92

French director Claude Lanzmann, whose 9.30am masterpiece Shoah gave flagrant testimony to the Holocaust through the testimonies of Jewish victims, German executioners and Polish pbaders-by, died at the age of 92 years.

The publishing house for Lanzmann's autobiography, stated that he died Thursday morning in a Paris hospital.

The power of Shoah filmed in the 1970s during Lanzmann's travels in barren Polish landscapes where the mbadacre of Jews was planned and executed, aimed to view the Holocaust as an event . in the present, rather than as a story. It contained no archive footage, no musical score – just the landscape, the trains and the memories told.

Lanzmann was 59 years old when the film, his second, was released in 1985. He set the Holocaust for those who saw him and defined him as a filmmaker

"I knew the subject of the film would be the death itself, death rather than survival, "writes Lanzmann in the autobiography. "For 12 years, I've tried to watch relentlessly the black sun of the Holocaust."

But it's not because it was a horror story that he ruled out beauty, he told the CBC in 2013

The beauty is not aesthetic, not at all, the film has not aged and will not age, there is not a wrinkle in this film, and I'm not sure about it. I am proud of it. "

Final film on North Korea

Shoah was almost unanimously hailed, Roger Ebert described it as "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.

The Polish government was a notable dissident "Polish propaganda" (but later authorized Shoah to be broadcast in Poland).

In 2013, nearly three decades later , Lanzmann revisits the Holocaust with The last of the unjust concurs entering on his talks in 1975 with a Viennese rabbi who was the last "old" of the Theresienstadt ghetto, which was used by the Nazis to deceive visitors into believing that Jews were treated humanely.

His latest film in 2017, Napalm was essentially an account of his visit to North Korea in the late 1950s, including telling him about his unfulfilled affair with a Red Cross nurse. in the country.

He was also the subject of Claude Lanzmann: Ghosts of the Shoah documentary of the 2015 Toronto journalist Adam Benzine. The film was nominated for an Oscar.

Has an affair with Simone de Beauvoir

Lanzmann was born on November 27, 1925 in Paris, the child of French Jews. After his mother's departure in 1934, the war broke out and his two brothers and sisters moved to a farm where their father was timing his children while they were training to escape from a shelter that he had dig.

Lanzmann eventually joined the Resistance as a Communist. He became intellectually in love with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose "anti-Semitic and Jewish" essay formed the philosophical foundation of what was to become the work of his life.

Lanzmann joined Sartre's circle and ended up having an affair with Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre. companion who was 17 years older than the young acolyte. Lanzmann left for Israel and settled with De Beauvoir on his return, from 1952 to 1959, according to The Patagonia Hare his autobiography.

Sartre, Lanzmann's hero, became a constant in their life together.

I was an opportunist – "on the mark", you say, but she was beautiful, my attraction to her was genuine, "he once told the biographer of Beauvoir. Long after the end of their affair, De Beauvoir provided much of the financial support to Shoah .

Lanzmann tinkered with politics and journalism, working periodically for the magazine France Dimanche, taking on freelance badignments. He joined Sartre in signing the Manifesto for the 121, calling French soldiers to refuse the fighting in Algeria and being prosecuted.

In 1968, he made televised reports on the Israeli army in the Sinai Peninsula. : Israel, why .

Found the nearest of the dead

De Beauvoir, writing about Lanzmann in his memoir Force of Circumstance, described him as someone who "seemed to bear that weight of an entire ancestral experience on his shoulders. "

It is this weight that finally drove a vagrant intellectual to examine the defining event of 20th century Judaism, obsessively tracking those who were closest to the dead. 19659002] "The film should take up the ultimate challenge, take the place of non-existent images of death in the gas chambers," he writes.

The film begins with Simon Srebnik, who for 13 years condemned Jew sang for the SS and fed their rabbit Seduced by a soft voice with his survival, Srebnik performs the same songs for Lanzmann as for the orchestra of concentration of Chelmno

along the placid river that leads to the camp. Later, he revealed that among the tasks of Srebnik was to throw sacks filled with Jews crushed in the same waters.

He filmed Abraham Bomba at work in a Tel Aviv hair salon, describing how he cut women's hair in the Treblinka gas chambers.

With periodic questions from Lanzmann, Bomba tells how, after each group of women, the hairdressers were invited to leave for a few minutes, the women were gbaded and the men returned to cut the hair of several naked women accompanied by their children.

"This piece is the last place they came alive and they will never come out alive again," he said. "We cut their hair to make them believe that they are going to get their hair cut."

The barber begged to stop when he remembered seeing a friend's wife and sister come in, but Lanzmann urged him to continue. ] "That justifies a life"

Lanzmann sometimes used secret cameras to record testimonies, including that of Franz Suchomel, a former Treblinka guard who pointed like a teacher on a camp map to show how bodies were thrown , describing Lanzmann promised Suchomel that he would not be registered.

One of Lanzmann's most poignant interviews was also among the briefest in Shoah – Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the Jews. Warsaw resistan, who survived Treblinka and saw countless friends and comrades die. He told Lanzmann bitterly: "If you could lick my heart, it would poison you."

At the premiere of the film, French journalist Jean Daniel told Lanzmann, "This justifies a life."

wife, Dominique, and her daughter Angelique. His son Felix died last year.