Documentary, 540 Min. (4 Parts), colour, France, 1974 -1985, English subtitles
On January 27, 2020, the world celebrated the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the deathcamp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As an act of remembrance, the
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, in collaboration with the
Embassy of Israel in India and the
Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany New Delhi, organize a screening of Claude Lanzmann’s epochal film
SHOAH on Monday, 24 February 2020 from 11.30 onwards.
SHOAH, with its extreme duration of more than nine hours, is an extraordinary work. It shows the testimonies of people, who had been perpetrators, bystanders or victims of the attempted extermination of the European Jews by the German Nazis. The director,
Claude Lanzmann, interviewed a vast number of witnesses and survivors. By contrasting their memories with images of the actual places, where the atrocities happened and the machinery of extermination did its work, the film acquires its emancipatory power. “I went to the places, by myself, and I understood, that one has to combine things. One needs to know and to see, and one needs to see and to know. (…) This is a topographic, a geographical film.” (Lanzmann)
Biography of the director
Claude Lanzmann was born in Paris in 1925. As a young man, he witnessed the invasion of German troops in France. In 1943, he joined the Résistance and fought in the underground. After the war, he studied philosophy, and began teaching at the Free University in Berlin in 1948/49. Friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he worked for the famous journal Les Temps Modernes and served as its editor. His first films were produced in 1970, documenting his engagement against the French politics in Algeria. In
Porquoi Israel? (
Why Israel?, 1973), he started his inquiries into his own Jewish identity and began working on
Shoah.
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