A New Yorker profile focusing on Claude Lanzmann and the movie “Shoah,” and its effects on how we think of and talk about the Holocaust today…

“When “Shoah” was released, in 1985, it was instantly historic. The nine-and-a-half-hour film about the German death camps in Poland is composed mainly of interviews with Jews who survived them, Germans who helped run them, and Poles who lived alongside them. As most of its first critics noted with surprise, the film contains no archival footage. With its long takes of extraordinarily detailed yet emotionally shattering testimony, “Shoah” turns the bearing of witness into its subject. It was immediately received as a cinematic object as incommensurable as its director intended to show the Holocaust itself to be.”

Read the full article here: 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/19/witness-5