Shoah

Shoah (1985) is Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half-hour French documentary about the Holocaust, available to watch online on iFILM. Eleven years in the making. No archival footage — not a single photograph, not a second of newsreel. Only living people, speaking on camera in the present tense.

Lanzmann groups his witnesses into three categories: survivors of Chelmno, Auschwitz, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; bystanders — railway workers, village residents, people who lived near the camps; and former SS officers, several of whom Lanzmann filmed covertly because they agreed to talk only if not recorded. Historian Raul Hilberg provides the documentary's analytical spine. But what the film is really made of is the pauses: the moment a barber describes cutting the hair of people he knew, in the same barbershop where he once cut their hair before.

What Lanzmann built here is not a film about the Holocaust so much as a film about the act of remembering it — the words people reach for, and the silences when no words come. Stream Shoah (1985) online on iFILM.