1985 Shoah Movie 2-Disc Box Set for Gift Collection Blu-ray

Plot Summary

SHOAR "Director: Claude Lanzmann Production: France, 1985 Duration: 9 hours Cinematography: Dominic Shapi, Jimmy Glasberg, William L ü chanski Recording: Bernard Aubrey Editing: Zwabastek, Anna Ruiz [Synopsis] This film explores the mass extermination of Jews in Europe during World War II, and its themes, forms, and scope are all broad and extensive. It is a work that every one of us should watch. From the perspective of memory and history, 'The Holocaust' surpasses other works that reflect the Holocaust in terms of the intensity of testimony and the rigor of history. Over the course of 13 years, Krodlangzman frequently searched for the truth about events and locations. The Holocaust "is not only an excellent historical document that depicts the Nazi extermination machine in detail, but also a long poem that takes the audience into a metaphysical experience and to the roots of barbarism. Shoah "encompasses a vast amount of journalist work and can be considered a model in terms of investigation and interviewing, but it is not just about reporting. It is also a film masterpiece (especially its editing), combining dozens of hours of interviews in a way that answers, collides, and connects with each other, repeatedly asking "why" but never getting an answer, because horror is no longer public. Claude Lanzmann said, "The film 'The Holocaust' is about the absoluteness of death, not about survivors. To survive is another story." [Claude Lanzmann] was born on November 27, 1925, in Paris. Filmmaker, writer, philosopher. Claude Langzmann is an important figure among French intellectuals. He was once a close friend of Paul Sartre and is now the editor in chief of the magazine "Modern" founded by this father of existentialism. His film career began with "Why Israel?" in 1973, followed by four more works: "Shoah" in 1985, "Wipha" in 1994, "Passing by the Living" in 1997, and "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 16:00" in 2002. All of his works are related to the extermination of Jews during World War II, Jewish identity, and the issue of Israel. His documentary works have won many important awards around the world. [Southern Weekend] Using the lens to search for an untraceable experience of catastrophe, this 11 year long, 9-and-a-half-hour documentary reveals the little-known history of what happened 60 years ago in a Nazi extermination camp... "The little white house in my memory, in the house, I dream every night..." On the Niel River in Poland, 47 year old Simon Slender sings this folk song again. In 1945, when Simon was 13 years old, he also sang along the river on a flat bottomed boat and went to feed the rabbits raised by the SS by the alfalfa meadow near the village. Kelno on the banks of the Niel River was the first place in Poland to use poison gas to exterminate Jews, where a total of 400000 Jews were killed. Simon is a survivor of the later stage. His father was executed by firing squad in front of him; His mother was poisoned to death by a "gas truck" in the Lodz quarantine zone 80 kilometers away. The SS sent him into a Jewish "labor force" to maintain the normal operation of the extermination camp, but they also had to die. On the night of January 18, 1945, two days before the arrival of Soviet troops, the Nazis executed the last "Jewish laborers" by firing squad. Simon was also executed, and the bullet did not hit the central nervous system. After waking up, he crawled into a pigsty where a Polish farmer took him in. A Red Army doctor saved his life, and a few months later, Simon and other survivors went to Tel Aviv. French documentary filmmaker Claude Langzman found him in Israel and convinced him to return to Kelno with him. In the camera, Simon stands on the edge of a grassy field surrounded by trees - there are many such places in rural Poland, and there is no special sign at all. It's always so quiet here, "he murmured." In the past, when we burned 2000 Jews every day, it was also so quiet. No one shouted, let's just do our work. It's very quiet, silent, just like now. "And that's how" The Holocaust "began. After 9 and a half hours, it will drag people into more complex and difficult to understand emotions, and endless thoughts. At the symposium, an audience member asked Lanzmann why such a lengthy film was composed entirely of interviews and aerial footage, without any historical materials appearing. Lanzmann had to explain the difference between "concentration camps" and "extermination camps" again: "Concentration camps were places where Jews were imprisoned, while extermination camps were places where Jews were slaughtered. In the materials we see of Nazi massacres of Jews, the vast majority of the scenes in concentration camps were taken when the Allies entered German territory. From these materials, we can see extremely thin and frail people, piles of corpses pushed into large pits by bulldozers... These are not necessarily products of slaughter, but the result of the German army's particularly chaotic management of concentration camps at the end of the war. Due to the tight supply of food and the sharp increase in the number of prisoners, infectious diseases such as typhoid fever and pneumonia spread, resulting in particularly high mortality rates in concentration camps. Not only Jews but also many other ethnic groups died. The person The extermination camp is a dedicated massacre assembly line - trains continuously transport Jews from centralized operations, and in just two or three hours, a train of Jews can be 'processed' clean. Most of the Nazi concentration camps were located in Germany, while the five extermination camps were all situated within Nazi occupied Poland: K ä rnow, B é zek, T ö blinka, Sobiborg, and Mardanek. The movie 'Cataclysm' involves the first four extermination camps, but no matter where they are, they have long disappeared in a physical sense. As a film, 'Cataclysm' has created much more in its production process than any other feature film. The reason why it is called a documentary is probably because everyone is a real person and they are talking about their own things. And the meaning of creation is that the vast majority of the content it discusses has already been destroyed, "said Langzman. The film explores and narrates the "destruction of destruction" - the deliberate destruction of traces and evidence related to extermination by the Nazis. For example, Simon Slender described the destruction of corpses in the film: "Bones that cannot be burned, such as the big bones of the feet, we... have a big box with two handles, and we carry it there. There are specialized people who crush everything there, and the bone powder is very fine. We put it in bags, and when we have enough bags, we carry it to the Nile River. There is a bridge over there, and it falls into the river, and then we walk with the water, following the waves." "" From this perspective, my so-called 'catastrophe' is an almost perfect murder because most of the traces are gone: the Bezek mentioned in the film, from an architectural perspective, is completely gone, not even a photo. None of them. Bezek executed 800000 people. Treblinka executed 1.2 million people, and in several years of research, all we could find was a picture taken from a distance of a bulldozer, without any other information. There are no photographic records left for places like Sobibor and Kelno. Faced with all of this, how to express it and how to take photos? What to shoot? How to make the audience feel like they are facing death? This film takes a path that previous generations have not taken, and it is an impossible challenge. ”Langzman went through this challenge for 11 years. From ambush to hand to hand combat, the production of 'Shoah' took 11 years and went through many stages. The initial stage is reading, starting with existing historical works and expanding to historical materials. The scope of reading is vast, and Langzmann describes it as "endless": "How to choose? How to conduct research? Who guides the way is worth following?" In order to make the entire historical landscape clearer, he tried to make a large table to clarify all the key points of everything. He also compiled a list of approximately 250-300 Germans from historical records and works. Because I didn't know what kind of people I would encounter, I made a list of people I might meet and prepared for the future. This process took about two years before and after, and then I went to Germany trembling, not because I was afraid of the Nazis, but because I didn't know what the outcome would be - whether I could see those people? What would happen if I saw them? Can I start? Where should I start? These unknowns made me very scared. "The film clearly shows the special nature of the party guard officers before the interview: there was always a van with an antenna parked on the street outside the interview location, with two assistants guarding the monitor inside. On the screen, the images were sent by the spy equipment carried by Lanzmann. Among the Nazi militants being filmed, only one knew each other, "it was the Nazi officer Treblinka, who said he couldn't be quoted by his name, but he mentioned my name during the filming, which also stayed in the film." At other times, the audience could hear from the film that he was referred to as Dr. Sorrell at times and Jean Marie Sorrell at other times. For safety reasons, these interviews were conducted under pseudonyms. In order to make the alias real, Langzman forged a complete set of documents, from birth certificates to passports. On his birth certificate, his place of birth is in a region called Kahn in France. Langzman specifically explained, "Because this area was bombed by the Allied forces during the war, all pre World War II archives were destroyed, so no one else has any evidence to check." In order to film a former SS officer who participated in the extermination operation and now works in a German bar, they wrote a letter to the bar owner in advance, saying that they were filming a beer show, and given that the bar is one of the best bars in Munich, it must be filmed for a long time. The boss agreed, and they filmed everything in the bar for two days with a very formal posture, except for their target. He was very clear about what he had done to himself, and his colleagues in the bar were also very clear about it, but they all had a very protective attitude towards him. It was an ambush battle with various temptations. His self-protection was also particularly strong, constantly spying on what we were filming for the past two days until the very end, and only then could we have a little bit of a shot of him, "Lanzmann recalled. In the film, this person remains silent to any questions, occasionally looking at the camera with a somewhat panicked and eerie gaze. Only at the end of the film, the interview with Dr. Grassler, the deputy director of the Warsaw Ghetto, was directly filmed by the camera. It was not that he accepted the filming request, but rather a more dramatic process. Previously, we attempted to contact a person named Kuben in northern Germany, whose rank was higher than all the Nazis in the current film. He was sentenced to death in Nuremberg and was granted amnesty by the US military at the last moment. During the trial with Kuben, the spy cameras were discovered and led to a physical battle. The receiving and transmitting equipment and spy cameras were destroyed or stolen, and I also stayed in the hospital for many days. "Lanzmann referred to this encounter as" a small battle in the 11 Years' War. Without the filming equipment, Lanzmann had to resort to other strategies. He observed Grassler for a long time and sent a German female collaborator to have contact with him, learning about all his lifestyle habits - when and where to go, and who to meet. I chose a moment when Grassler was alone at home, accompanied by a photographer, a sound engineer, and two other collaborators. Suddenly, I knocked on the door and made a friendly and irresistible gesture. I didn't say I wanted to ask him about his situation, but rather wanted to know about the situation of Jewish Zeniakov (the head of the Jewish Council). But as soon as we started talking, Langzmantu was caught off guard and his questions were pressing, causing his answers to stutter, his face to contort, and his gaze to wander. The testimony of Jewish survivors of the "Returning Wanderers" takes up the largest portion of the film. Most of them were members of the "Jewish Labor Corps" and worked in various stages of the massacre and cleanup process in extermination camps. Mok Zaid and Izhak Dukin's original mission was to open Wiener's mass grave, excavate 90000 Jewish corpses, and burn them. When opening the last ditch, Zaid recognized his family: his mother, three sisters and their children. When digging deeper, the body becomes flatter, and in the end, it looks like a thin sheet that shatters when caught and pulled out. "In a more famous long shot, barber Abraham Bamba cuts hair for customers while giving an interview to Langzman. He was once selected by the Germans to go to the Treblinka extermination camp. Before the women were sent to the gas chamber, he cut off their hair. During my time shaving my head in the gas chamber, there was a train coming from my city of Jestova, and I knew most of the women... who lived on the same street and had a few close friends. As soon as they saw me, they surrounded me and said, 'Abe, what are you doing here?'? What are they going to do to us? What can I say? My friend, who is with me, is also a good barber in our city. When his wife and sister entered the gas chamber... "The barber fell silent for over three minutes, with only the sound of scissors ringing in the barber shop. Under the persistent questioning of Lanzmann, the barber's eyes were filled with tears and he stuttered," It's too scary... stop talking... "" I think the term 'survivors' is wrong, I'd rather call these people' returning wandering souls. 'For me, all the Jews who spoke in the film had already' died ', they were just still wandering in this world. "Lanzmann said he had decided from the beginning how to choose Jewish witnesses. The purpose of this work is not to let these people talk about how they survived or how they avoided death, it is about death. That's why I quickly realized that there would be no reason for the Holocaust in this film, and there was no need to talk about why these people died - everything started too late and there was no remedy, it started directly from death. Under this principle, I knew from the beginning that my choice of Jews was mainly to choose those so-called 'special labor forces'. They had a layer of contact with Germans, and they were direct witnesses to the genocide of their own nation. Their testimony on both sides was undoubtedly the most important. Difficulty. Despite being forced, their work was to some extent a part of the massacre of their own people. Langzman patiently persuaded and relentlessly questioned, but not to demand their repentance. Indeed, all the ghettos have Jewish police officers. Did Jewish police officers play a lubricating and driving role in the massacre? I think these issues should be prioritized. The Holocaust was done by Germans, not Jews; whether Jews like Jeniakov helped Germans, I think it's completely secondary. "Lanzmann's evaluation of them is almost perfect:" I think all these Jewish witnesses in the film show their complete humanity. They are saints, heroes, and martyrs - as I just said, they were 'dead' at that time, so they are martyrs. On this issue, I don't want people to misunderstand 'The Holocaust'. "Lanzmann said in the film. We also interviewed farmers around the Teblinka extermination camp, Interviewed train drivers transporting Jews. When the Jewish people in the whole car were sent to the station, they were still unaware of their fate a moment later. The farmers vividly remember the scene back then, knowing everything that was about to happen, but they couldn't help at all; The train driver repeatedly gestured to the Jews to strangle him, but no one understood. People may inevitably feel that they are numb, cowardly, and unscrupulous, but in 'The Holocaust', they are witnesses, just like the survivors of the 'Jewish labor force'. It was they who froze the almost lost history. This film is their tomb. "Lanzmann is Jewish. During his childhood, he personally experienced anti Semitic activities in France. Langzman said that his father was a "thorough pessimist" who knew what was about to happen as soon as anti Semitism emerged. The Nazis had not yet reached that point, and their family had already produced many fake certificates. The whole family lived under false identities, so that no one in the family was exiled or died in the Holocaust. But things are not that simple either. For example, due to various circumstances, my parents were separated. My mother lived in Paris during the war and hid in a closet for a year. My father, brother, and I lived in the Auvergne Mountains. After the war began, my father and brother quickly joined the resistance movement. I was a minor at the time and joined the youth league led by the French Communist Party in 1943. During high school, I fought guerrilla warfare and had physical battles with the Germans. "However, Langzmann does not believe that these experiences have a direct causal relationship with his filming of" Shoah ". Although he still occasionally asks himself: Why did I do 'The Holocaust' instead of other Jews? At the beginning of the 20th century, a mountaineer was determined to climb Mount Everest and eventually died there. Because climbing required a lot of effort, someone asked him why he was so persistent, and the answer was: it was because it was there. The same was true for 'Cataclysm': that thing was there, and I wanted to film it, that's all. In addition, it must be related to the Jewish issue, I think it was the mass extermination of Jews. But the final result, many people did not just see it as a Jewish issue after seeing it, in fact, it had universal humanity. "Langzman recalled that when he was a child and growing up, various forms of killing such as beheading and execution were very attractive to him; Another issue is anxiety: "I want to understand what happens when a person is awake and aware that they are about to die, such as standing or sitting, knowing that they are about to be poisoned. Related to the anxiety of the so-called 'last moment', I also care about the 'first moment'. So I also ask others, when did the first train you saw come, what was your impression of coming here for the first time..." This motivation is unbelievably simple, but it drove Langzmann to suffer for 11 years. Making 'Cataclysm' is like a difficult summit starting from the north slope. Going to places that no one else has been to, taking paths that no one else has been to, and needing to find their own way. Sometimes even tools have to be made, finding their own methods, and constantly climbing and conquering to reach the summit. During the 11 year long production process, I found that its creation is a war without any mercy, for anyone related to 'Cataclysm', all the issues involved in the film, and the entire production process. Sometimes it gets stuck and there is no way to continue. It has been stuck several times during the very long research process, filming process, not to mention the editing stage, which lasted for 5 years, "said Langzmann. The entire 11 years of work were not intermittent, but rather spent every day working on 'Catastrophe'. But there were times when I couldn't move anything for 3 days, there were times when I couldn't move for 8 days, and the longest time was a month, and I couldn't move forward at all. "Because the purpose of the work is certainly not to tell some information, certainly not a series of unknown information. In what sense, it can be a work of film art? What is its clue? It requires a very good brain to think, and constantly thinking. It takes time and great patience." Longzman is most proud of that in film production, time is entirely up to him the final say. He did not make any compromises to anyone or anything. This is indeed not a condition that everyone can encounter. In 1985, when Lanzmann completed "Apocalypse," he thought, "If someone watched it, it would be good enough. About 3000 people watched it, and that was considered a thing of the past." However, the film caused a huge stir