Claude Lanzmann

Claude Lanzmann
ActuaLitté · CC BY-SA 2.0 · source
Name	Claude Lanzmann
Caption	Lanzmann in 2011
Birth date	27 November 1925
Birth place	Bois-Colombes, France
Death date	5 July 2018
Death place	Paris, France
Occupation	Film director, journalist, philosopher
Known for	Shoah
Alma mater	University of Tübingen, Lycée Condorcet, Lycée Blaise-Pascal
Partner	Dominique Petithory (1995–2018)
Awards	Honorary Oscar, Légion d'honneur

Claude Lanzmann was a French filmmaker, journalist, and philosopher renowned for his monumental documentary work on the Holocaust. He is best known for his nine-and-a-half-hour epic film Shoah, a landmark in cinema vérité that eschewed archival footage to focus on the testimonies of survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. A close associate of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Lanzmann was a lifelong intellectual committed to exploring the extremes of human experience, particularly the Shoah, which he insisted was a unique historical event. His rigorous, often confrontational approach to memory and testimony established him as a towering figure in 20th-century French cinema and Holocaust studies.

Early life and education

Born in Bois-Colombes to a Jewish family originally from Eastern Europe, he grew up in the Parisian suburb of Briey. His father, a veteran of World War I, owned a business. With the outbreak of World War II and the German occupation of France, he joined the French Resistance as a teenager, participating in activities with the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans in Auvergne and the Clermont-Ferrand region. After the Liberation of Paris, he studied philosophy at the Lycée Condorcet and later at the University of Tübingen in the French occupation zone in Germany. His early intellectual formation was deeply influenced by the existentialist circles of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Career and major works

In the postwar years, he began a career in journalism, writing for newspapers like Le Monde. In 1952, he became a close collaborator and editor at Les Temps Modernes, the influential journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, eventually becoming its director. His first major film was Pourquoi Israël (1973), a three-hour exploration of the identity and contradictions of the nascent State of Israel. This project led directly to his decision to undertake a film about the Holocaust, a work that would consume over a decade of his life. His later cinematic works include Tsahal (1994), an examination of the Israel Defense Forces, and Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures (2001), focusing on the Sobibor extermination camp uprising.

Shoah and its impact

The film Shoah, released in 1985, is his defining achievement. Rejecting all historical footage, the film constructs its narrative entirely through present-day interviews conducted at the sites of the extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Chełmno, as well as with former Nazi officials such as Franz Suchomel and Walter Stier. His method involved relentless questioning, sometimes using hidden cameras, to elicit raw testimony from perpetrators, while offering a profound space for survivors like Simon Srebnik and Abraham Bomba. The film's unprecedented length and formal rigor sparked global debate, winning numerous awards including the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary and fundamentally altering the historiography of the Holocaust and the language of documentary film.

Later works and public role

Following the international success of Shoah, he remained a prominent public intellectual in France. He published a well-received memoir, The Patagonian Hare, in 2009, which detailed his extraordinary life and the making of his films. He continued to direct documentaries, including The Last of the Unjust (2013), which centered on the controversial figure of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish elder of the Theresienstadt Ghetto. As the editor of Les Temps Modernes, he was a vocal commentator on political issues, maintaining a staunch, often controversial, commitment to Zionism and the state of Israel while critiquing what he saw as historical revisionism.

Personal life and death

He had a long-term relationship with the French writer and editor Judith Magre. From 1963 to 1971, he lived with Simone de Beauvoir, following her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. He was later partnered with the German-born filmmaker Angelika Schrobsdorff, and finally with the architect Dominique Petithory, who was with him until his death. He died at his home in Paris on 5 July 2018, at the age of 92. His death was marked by official tributes from figures including French President Emmanuel Macron, who hailed him as a "monument of the 20th century."

Legacy and influence

His legacy is inextricably linked to his radical redefinition of the historical documentary. Shoah is considered a canonical work, preserved in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress and studied globally in departments of film studies, history, and Jewish studies. His insistence on the uniqueness of the Shoah and his philosophical interrogation of memory, evil, and survival have influenced thinkers like Jacques Derrida and filmmakers from Marcel Ophüls to Joshua Oppenheimer. In 2011, he received an Honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement, cementing his status as a filmmaker who transformed the ethical and aesthetic possibilities of cinema.

Category:French film directors Category:French journalists Category:Holocaust documentary filmmakers