Claude Lanzmann

Forty years after the release of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film Shoah, Guillaume Ribot reveals the director’s relentless pursuit to tell the untold, using only Lanzmann’s words and unseen footage from the masterpiece.

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A chronicle of the Holocaust, told by the resilient survivors who lived through it.

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After his retirement, french philosopher and bullfighting enthusiast Francis Wolff decides to embark on a journey to France, Spain and Mexico joined by two mexican filmmakers who hardly know anything about bullfighting, a culture whose days seem to be numbered. During their road trip, they encounter numerous personalities with whom they reflect on mankind’s relationship with animals and nature, but most importantly on our relationship with death and the meaning of the ultimate journey: life itself.

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This film tells the life story of Ziva Postec, emphasizing the period when she was editing Shoah from 350 hours of footage.

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Since 1999, Claude Lanzmann has made several films that could be considered satellites of Shoah, comprised of interviews conducted in the 1970s that didn’t make it into the final, monumental work. He has just completed a series of four new films, built around four women from four different areas of Eastern Europe with four different destinies, each finding herself unexpectedly and improbably alive after war’s end.

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Paula Biren, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman, Hanna Marton: Four Jewish women, witnesses and survivors of the most insane and pitiless barbarism, and who, for that reason alone, but for many others also, deserve to be inscribed forever into the memory of humankind. What they have in common, beside the specific horrors to which each of them were subjected, is a searingly sharp, almost-physical intelligence, which rejects all pretence or faulty reasoning. In a word, idealism.

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Napalm is the story of the breathtaking and brief encounter, in 1958, between a French member of the first Western European delegation officially invited to North Korea after the devastating Korean war and a nurse working for the Korean Red Cross hospital, in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

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A documentary about Jerry Lewis' never-released movie "The Day the Clown Cried".

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Claude Lanzmann discusses the long and difficult process of researching, shooting, editing, and presenting his groundbreaking and influential documentary, "Shoah" (1985).

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A place: Theresienstadt. A unique place of propaganda which Adolf Eichmann called the "model ghetto", designed to mislead the world and Jewish people regarding its real nature, to be the last step before the gas chamber. A man: Benjamin Murmelstein, last president of the Theresienstadt Jewish Council, a fallen hero condemned to exile, who was forced to negotiate day after day from 1938 until the end of the war with Eichmann, to whose trial Murmelstein wasn't even called to testify. Even though he was without a doubt the one who knew the Nazi executioner best. More than twenty-five years after Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's new film reveals a little-known yet fundamental aspect of the Holocaust, and sheds light on the origins of the "Final Solution" like never before.

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Serge Toubiana, director of the Cinémathèque française, sat down with director Claude Lanzmann in his office in Paris in January 2013 to discuss the making of his epic work. Their conversation, presented here, was recorded exclusively for the Criterion Collection.

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This film, produced by the Museum’s Spielberg Film Archive staff, features 55 minutes of previously unseen interviews from the Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection. SHOAH: The Unseen Interviews includes the testimony of Abraham Bomba, a barber in the Treblinka killing center, who escaped, was smuggled back into the ghetto, and tried to warn friends, who refused to believe what was happening; details of American responses to the Holocaust from Peter Bergson, who tried to rally American Jews and the US government to act sooner to save the Jews in Europe; and Ruth Elias’s harrowing tale of survival in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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A powerful new film about Jan Karski, the Polish resistance figure who attempted to expose the Warsaw Ghetto and Belzec, and met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

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At the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Israel, Claude Lanzmann made an interview of Ehud Barak, on March 1st, 2008.

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Documentary interview with Yehuda Lerner, who at 17 participated in a prisoner revolt at the Nazi-run Sobibor extermination camp. Originally filmed for inclusion in Lanzmann's 1985 documentary Shoah.

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An interview with a WWII Red Cross official who wrote a glowing report on a Jewish ghetto-cum-death camp.

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The ideologies underlying the foundation of modern Israel are explored in this documentary, the third of a trilogy (created over a twenty year span) exploring the Jewish experience. The two earlier documentaries, "Porquoi Israel," and "Shoah," have had great effect on the ways documentaries are produced. "Tsahal" zeroes in on the crucial role of the military in Israeli society and politics. The film uses many in-depth interviews to present the many feelings and thoughts about the Israeli military.

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Marcel Ophuls' riveting film details the heinous legacy of the Gestapo head dubbed "The Butcher of Lyon." Responsible for over 4,000 deaths in occupied France during World War II, Barbie would escape—with U.S. help—to South America in 1951, where he lived until a global manhunt led to his 1983 arrest and subsequent trial.

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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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Apostrophes was a live, weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. It ran for fifteen years (724 episodes) from January 10, 1975, to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television (around 6 million regular viewers). It was broadcast on Friday nights on the channel France 2 (which was called "Antenne 2" from 1975 to 1992). The hourlong show was devoted to books, authors and literature. The format varied between one-on-one interviews with a single author and open discussions between four or five authors.

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Using interviews and other footage shot especially for this documentary, French director Claude Lanzmann investigates the state of Israel in 1972. This movie concentrates on Israelis going about their business of everyday living.

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Annual awarding of the Grimme Awards.

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This historic documentary highlights the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre's thoughts in all its forms: novel, theater, philosophy, political commitments. Surrounded by Claude Lanzmann, Michel Contat, JB Pontalis, Jean Toussaint Desanti and Bernard Henri Levy, Sartre expresses himself at length in this rare film. Features rare on-camera interview film footage of Sartre giving his thoughts on the following subjects: Sartre on Philosophy Sartre on Intellectualism Sartre on Literature Sartre on the Theater Sartre on Literary Activism Sartre on Discussions Sartre on his novel, "Nausea" Sartre on the Review, "Les Temps Modernes"

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Since 1999, Claude Lanzmann has made several films that could be considered satellites of Shoah, comprised of interviews conducted in the 1970s that didn’t make it into the final, monumental work. He has just completed a series of four new films, built around four women from four different areas of Eastern Europe with four different destinies, each finding herself unexpectedly and improbably alive after war’s end.

Open details →

Paula Biren, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman, Hanna Marton: Four Jewish women, witnesses and survivors of the most insane and pitiless barbarism, and who, for that reason alone, but for many others also, deserve to be inscribed forever into the memory of humankind. What they have in common, beside the specific horrors to which each of them were subjected, is a searingly sharp, almost-physical intelligence, which rejects all pretence or faulty reasoning. In a word, idealism.

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Napalm is the story of the breathtaking and brief encounter, in 1958, between a French member of the first Western European delegation officially invited to North Korea after the devastating Korean war and a nurse working for the Korean Red Cross hospital, in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Open details →

A place: Theresienstadt. A unique place of propaganda which Adolf Eichmann called the "model ghetto", designed to mislead the world and Jewish people regarding its real nature, to be the last step before the gas chamber. A man: Benjamin Murmelstein, last president of the Theresienstadt Jewish Council, a fallen hero condemned to exile, who was forced to negotiate day after day from 1938 until the end of the war with Eichmann, to whose trial Murmelstein wasn't even called to testify. Even though he was without a doubt the one who knew the Nazi executioner best. More than twenty-five years after Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's new film reveals a little-known yet fundamental aspect of the Holocaust, and sheds light on the origins of the "Final Solution" like never before.

Open details →

A powerful new film about Jan Karski, the Polish resistance figure who attempted to expose the Warsaw Ghetto and Belzec, and met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Open details →

At the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Israel, Claude Lanzmann made an interview of Ehud Barak, on March 1st, 2008.

Open details →

Documentary interview with Yehuda Lerner, who at 17 participated in a prisoner revolt at the Nazi-run Sobibor extermination camp. Originally filmed for inclusion in Lanzmann's 1985 documentary Shoah.

Open details →

An interview with a WWII Red Cross official who wrote a glowing report on a Jewish ghetto-cum-death camp.

Open details →

The ideologies underlying the foundation of modern Israel are explored in this documentary, the third of a trilogy (created over a twenty year span) exploring the Jewish experience. The two earlier documentaries, "Porquoi Israel," and "Shoah," have had great effect on the ways documentaries are produced. "Tsahal" zeroes in on the crucial role of the military in Israeli society and politics. The film uses many in-depth interviews to present the many feelings and thoughts about the Israeli military.

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Using interviews and other footage shot especially for this documentary, French director Claude Lanzmann investigates the state of Israel in 1972. This movie concentrates on Israelis going about their business of everyday living.

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In the middle of the Algerian war, Elise, from Bordeaux, “goes” to Paris to join her brother to earn her living in an automobile factory. There she meets Arezki, an Algerian nationalist activist with whom she falls in love. A chronicle of working life at the time and which highlights the extent of police repression against Algerians.

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