
Shoah
1985 · Film · documentary · 566 min
Directed by Claude Lanzmann
Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.
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Shoah - a 9.5 hour documentary about the Holocaust https://letterboxd.com/film/shoah/
Sügisball - an Estonian movie that introduced me to the works of Bohren & der Club of Gore, now my favorite band https://letterboxd.com/film/autumn-ball/
Fitzcarraldo - Werner Herzog moves hell and earth in this film https://letterboxd.com/film/fitzcarraldo/
Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love - Wong Kar-Wai's movies affected me so much that when I went to Hong Kong about half my trip was just looking for the filming locations https://letterboxd.com/film/chungking-express/ & https://letterboxd.com/film/in-the-mood-for-love/
UHF - Probably the reason I like underdogs https://letterboxd.com/film/uhf/
I mean, come on. WW2 and all that.
What's the worst that could happen... sheesh why don't we not find out for a change.
Watch the 10hr long interview documentary called Shoah and listen to how trains, buildings and institutions were used to do 'the deed'.
It was impossible to tell what was going to happen ahead of time for the victims, they assumed they were heading to a labour camp and being assigned a block of soap and sent to the showers was a good thing...
Why does this even need to be said! Do we not know our dark european history?
Conserving the known good we have, is not an 'immediate fail', as many futurists would indulge in saying...
At least you know now where you can discover one reason (of many) as to why some people are wary of collective control.
I think magical, positive thinking is protective even in the most dire times or atrocities. This is an intuition that's based on anecdotes from watching the documentary Shoah and reading Man's Search for Meaning, both of which cover how survivors dealt with the Holocaust.
Secret History of silicon valley, more a presentation. It gave insight into the collaboration of astrophysics and the military.
Shoah: An documentary about the holocaust 11 hours long, but without any archive footage. The maker interviews all kinds of people. Farmers living next to train emplacements used, train drivers, perpetrators and more.
The film Shoah always struck me for similar reasons
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_(film)
They did many of these interviews in the 70’s so a little more than 30 years after the Holocaust.
Seeing them interview some farmer who was 20 at the time and lived near the village of Auschwitz and remembers seeing the trains going in full of people and coming out empty really hits home as it all happened in the midst of people just living their lives.
There isn't international agreement on the definition of Holocaust.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust
> Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”), Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban (“Destruction”), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by NaziGermany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.” Yiddish-speaking Jews and survivors in the years immediately following their liberation called the murder of the Jews the Ḥurban, the word used to describe the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 bce and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 ce. Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”) is the term preferred by Israelis and the French, most especially after Claude Lanzmann’s masterful 1985 motion picture documentary of that title. It is also preferred by people who speak Hebrew and by those who want to be more particular about the Jewish experience or who are uncomfortable with the religious connotations of the word Holocaust. Less universal and more particular, Shoʾah emphasizes the annihilation of the Jews, not the totality of Nazi victims.
Versus
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust
> The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.
> During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived racial and biological inferiority: Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others), Soviet prisoners of war, and Black people. Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.
This is a volume problem that has no real solution. On one hand, it's a shame that this kind of content is getting removed, but on the other, it's also untenable for YouTube to hire thousands upon thousands of video moderators. It's a sad reality that if anyone uploaded content akin to Shoah[1] -- the 9-hour-long Holocaust documentary; a personal favorite and an absolute masterpiece -- it would get promptly removed. But it's a reality nonetheless.
YouTube is trying to straddle the line between platform and publisher and it feels like the hammer will soon drop.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_(film)
'Shoah', by Claude Lanzmann, who passed away earlier this year after a career of excellent documentary filmmaking.
Review by Roger Ebert when it was first released: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-shoah-1985
Try Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah". It's a very unusual documentary without any material from historical film archives. He talked to jewish survivors, to their neighbours and also to Nazis, that were discovered by him. He filmed many locations as they were in the 70's (when the documentary was finished) and much much more. The documentary is about 10 hours long, and it took him several years to create. Lanzmann participated in the french résistance.