Claude Lanzmann’s lionized nine plus hour Holocaust documentary, famously crafted without a frame of historical stock footage, is haunting and powerful in select moments, though more numbing than anything overall and ultimately exhausting and repetitious. It also serves as a show of self-aggrandizement for its filmmaker who interjects himself often, whether he's prodding a survivor to reveal a painfully suppressed memory, bickering with party functionaries over semantics, cajoling a group of Poles to admit to anti-Semitism, or casting blame and attempting to induce guilt on anyone and everyone for the horrors that took ...
Claude Lanzmann’s lionized nine plus hour Holocaust documentary, famously crafted without a frame of historical stock footage, is haunting and powerful in select moments, though more numbing than anything overall and ultimately exhausting and repetitious. It also serves as a show of self-aggrandizement for its filmmaker who interjects himself often, whether he's prodding a survivor to reveal a painfully suppressed memory, bickering with party functionaries over semantics, cajoling a group of Poles to admit to anti-Semitism, or casting blame and attempting to induce guilt on anyone and everyone for the horrors that took ...