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An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah
Honorable Mention, 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Claude Lanzmann's 1985 magnum opus, Shoah , is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust—and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe , Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and, above all, gender—Lanzmann's twenty hours of interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film.
To view the book trailer on YouTube, please go
Claude Lanzmann's 1985 magnum opus, Shoah , is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust—and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe , Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and, above all, gender—Lanzmann's twenty hours of interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film.
To view the book trailer on YouTube, please go
352 pages, Hardcover
Published June 1, 2019
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May 10, 2024
For anyone who has watched all 9.5 hours of Shoah (1985), this is a super interesting book. Cazenave has viewed the ~230 hours of interview footage cut from the film and examines - among other things - how Lanzmann‘s project evolved over ~11 years, how he directed the interviews to get the results he wanted, and how he genuinely struggled to produce the final film via a difficult and lengthy editing process he compared to composing with Leibniz's incompossibles (basically, the notion of building a whole out of incompatible parts).
I'm not sure I'm (yet) crazy enough to tackle all 230 hours of unused interview footage but there's a handful of interviews I really want to check out after reading this book: for starters, when Lanzmann was still using a (then recently-invented) Paluche camera to clandestinely record his interviews with former Nazis, he attempted to interview convicted Nazi death squad member Heinz Schubert at his home. Neighbors noticed the video footage being transmitted into Lanzmann's minivan parked outside and let Schubert know that he was being filmed, which led to a violent confrontation between Schubert's son and Lanzmann, who managed to escape without his Paluche. Schubert later brought charges against Lanzmann, who was later cleared and had his Paluche returned.
I'm not sure I'm (yet) crazy enough to tackle all 230 hours of unused interview footage but there's a handful of interviews I really want to check out after reading this book: for starters, when Lanzmann was still using a (then recently-invented) Paluche camera to clandestinely record his interviews with former Nazis, he attempted to interview convicted Nazi death squad member Heinz Schubert at his home. Neighbors noticed the video footage being transmitted into Lanzmann's minivan parked outside and let Schubert know that he was being filmed, which led to a violent confrontation between Schubert's son and Lanzmann, who managed to escape without his Paluche. Schubert later brought charges against Lanzmann, who was later cleared and had his Paluche returned.
Displaying 1 of 1 review