Shoah (BFI Film Classics) - Softcover

Vice, Sue

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844573257 ISBN 13: 9781844573257

Publisher: British Film Institute, 2011

Synopsis

Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour 1985 epic Shoah—its title is the Hebrew word for “catastrophe”—is the distillation of more than 350 hours of film gathered over 11 years. It tells the story of the Holocaust through interviews with the survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators. In 2000, the Guardian film critic Derek Malcolm called it “one of the most remarkable films ever made.” It has also provoked debates about the very possibility of Holocaust representation. Sue Vice provides a devoted study of the film, discussing the problematic role of Lanzmann as the director and the numerous controversies and conclusions that Shoah has produced. Some of the topics she covers are: Lanzmann as filmmaker, mise-en-scène, Lanzmann as interviewer, the ethics of filming, testimony, and more.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Claude Lanzmann's epic 1985 film Shoah is the distillation of more than 350 hours of footage gathered over eleven years. The film tells the story of the Holocaust through interviews with survivors of the extermination camps, bystanders who watched or participated in mass murder, and some of the perpetrators of genocide. As a filmic document of the Holocaust, it shuns those staple elements of archival footage or a consistent voiceover that characterise other classic works. Instead, it is composed entirely of eyewitness interviews in a wide range of settings, contrasted with footage of landscape in the present, and with the chilling imagery of travelling trains. In this way, Shoah's effect is to represent the past, but only as it exists in the present, and it is, in Lanzmann's phrase, a 'fiction of the real', and not a simple documentary.

In this insightful study, Sue Vice explores Shoah both as cinema and as an example of Holocaust representation. In addition, the author follows Lanzmann's declaration that 'Shoah is a fight against generalities' in emphasising the importance of the detail in both dialogue and filmic technique. Vice uses close readings of some of the film's interviews – including that with Abraham Bomba, a barber at the death camp Treblinka, and one secretly filmed with Franz Suchomel, a guard at the same camp – to explore the background to the film, the difficulties in its financing and production, and the long process of editing that led to Lanzmann's realisation that 'the subject of my film is death itself, death and not survival'.

About the Author

SUE VICE Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester University Press 1997, second edn 1998), Holocaust Fiction (Routledge 2000), Children Writing the Holocaust (Palgrave 2004) and Jack Rosenthal (Manchester University Press 2008), and the editor of Representing the Holocaust: Essays in Honour of Bryan Burns (Vallentine Mitchell 2003).

About this edition

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1844573257
• ISBN 13: 9781844573257
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128