The most important film lest we forget - and a work of art!

"An everlasting name
I will give them,
not be cut off. "
Isaiah 56, 5
Shoah, which is that immortal name. The term comes from Hebrew and means something like "destruction" or "extinction". For Jews around the world this word has become synonymous with the Holocaust, the greatest crime of humanity has become.
With "Shoah" titled, the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann 1985 with over 9 hours, the famous documentary about the death of the Nazis and those same aspect of the "immortality" of "immortality" may well take any movie so lay claim as "Shoah".
Lanzmann's opus magnum is unparalleled in difficult genre of Holocaust film; it is the film that had to be made when the last witnesses of horror were still alive. Deliberately omitted the director on any archive or even reconstruction materials; the use of music is completely foreign to him.
No, Lanzmann's film does not require additional dramatization such as the hated of the now 77 years French films "Schindler's List" or "The Last Days": He leaves only the memories speak for themselves, leads more than nine hours interviews with victims, perpetrators (often with a hidden camera) and witnesses, let his cameras often travel through the villages and remains of the horror - Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor.
The talks, which he leads, and above all, the questions he asks, are of agonizing intensity. Lanzmann is not an objective observer. He wants the audience to participate in any form of the memory and dealing with the past; he pushes many of his interviewees to express that what is so cruel that any just trying to displace it as soon as possible.
But here the intention of the work is clear. In those scenes, in which he as a Jewish barber who the naked women and children already in the gas chamber still had his hair cut, and then drives to continue speaking, as this most urgently asking him to stop, or if he a working in the days of the Holocaust in the crematoria prisoner talks, describing how he recognized the futility of his life when he saw go into the gas chamber his own countrymen. Tearfully pleads that Lanzmann at this point, but turn off the camera - but Lanzmann lets his camera static and mercilessly on the face of the interviewee.
"Shoah" is what had to be shown - unconditionally, oppressive and truthful. Again and again makes Lanzmann his interlocutors realize how immensely important it is that they play everything so detailed as humanly possible, however painful this may be for you also.
But precisely in this way he also involved the audience in the confrontation with the terrible truth and that uncompromising will to view this horrific reality raises "Shoah" far above all other films of this kind also.
A contemporary document invaluable!