"Lanzmann builds the past using tools that exist only in the present, summoning an unfathomable catastrophe with the voices and memories of survivors." - Ed Gonzalez

Really strong documentary. The 9 hours are tough to get through but only because of the intensity of the subject, it flows really well and is always interesting. I found Lanzmann's interview style to be somewhat abrasive and it's really the only thing that detracted from an otherwise impressive achievement.

I'm not sure if this can be called "Cinema", but it's a monumental experience, which will leave a mark and haunt you forever.

159

#166

i gave it full marks not because it is perfect but it's ridiculous to rate it. maybe you'll just have to watch it and think on the banality of evil. and i repeat again, it's impossible to rate something what doesnt have an artistic goal and is completely nonfiction, in addition to that it is also applicable for nuit et brouillard. Just experience it and 'brood' on humanity, screw the camera angles, direction, script etc. if you say you can't, sorry to break it to you, but it's not your kind of

How can something as schathing and scarring on the twentieth century and the human race itself as the Holocaust be explained. How can it be understood? Lanzmann poses that it cannot be understood through recreation or archeology but through people in themselves. The excecutioners, the survivors and bystanders. All get their voice. Some will call it microphone-holding, but really this is lending a voice to something you would never have heard in itself. And it is terryfying. And it is true.

The ultimate Holocaust film. Pretty goddamned exhausting, but when you think about it, you soon realize that a film like this had to be made while there were still plenty of people alive who had been there. The sheer monstrosity of the "Final Solution" may be too much for our tiny human brains to ever comprehend; a movie of this length with this thoroughness is probably as close as any motion picture will ever get to really grasping it. The lack of stock film, if anything, makes this MORE scary

# 148

So horrible and upsetting. The stories told in Shoah are brutal and depressing -- how can they not be?

The closest that cinema has come to being able to genuinely respond to a theme and an event that seems to defy any possibility of adequate cinematic treatment. Also, the greatest use of cinema as a documentary instrument.

Indescribable.

Shoah strongly resists commentary. What can you say of a documentary 9:30 hours long (edited down from 10 times as much raw footage all of it original); interviews with witnesses, survivors and perpetrators and contemporary shots of the locations where history's most heinous genocide took place. It may be the best docu ever made, but it's decidedly un-cinematic, never aesthetic, and takes the medium to its most crystalline translucence. No artistry or craftsmanship, just historical horror.

This is really quite an achievement, and while its length makes it seem as if it is most interested in presenting the scope of the Holocaust, in reality, it seems more interested in presenting the people, rooted in their historical context by concrete details.

There's nothing I can write here that can properly explain what I felt after the 9 1/2 hours. A draining, haunting experience.

152

With it's description and a 9 hour run time, I was going into it almost as a challenge, daring it to keep me interested. Not only was I completely engrossed, but the pacing, although slow, is very solid and eventually the hours just melt away.