Shoah (4 Disc Set & 184 Page Book Special Edition Box Set) (UK PAL/Region 2)

Shoah (4 Disc Set & 184 Page Book Special Edition Box Set) (UK PAL/Region 2) Review

I have been reading and studying about the Holocaust for roughly 45 years. When I was young I couldn't understand how such a thing could occur and yet it did and on such a mammouth scale that comprehension still escapes us. I had heard about "Shoah" for anumber of years and would have watched it sooner except I could never find it on any available network or other outlet. Thus I bought my own copy and watched it over the course of a couple of months.

"Shoah" is a set of 4 DVDs that have approximately 125 "chapters" overall and a viewing time of 9 1/2 hours. It consists of a number of interviews with Holocaust survivors, witnesses and even a few participants. The series of interviews are generally in a loosely chronological order as far as the events they describe. This makes for a more orderly (if that is possible) and focused perspective. The overall cast of interviewees are somewhat limited (thanks largely to the SS and similar obstacles) yet they provide a great deal of detailed eyewitness accounts of their experiences. There are two or three German officials interviewed (one who was apparently unaware he was being recorded) and their information was also an important inclusion in the overall accounts. The interviews often took place indoors but the director used plenty of outdoor footage of the actual sites in which the events being described took place. The last part of the last DVD focuses on the Warsaw Ghetto and the subsequent uprising. The account of Simha Rottem, a survivor of the Warsaw Getto uprising, may have been the most impressive of the many soberly stunning accounts in the film.

There are some aspects of the movie that I found less absorbing than others but they were very few. I thought that the director, Claude Lanzmann, spent too much time talking to Raul Hilberg, an historian. Mr. Hilberg had some relevant things to offer but he was an outsider in a film made up of interviewers with insiders. There was also a Polish leader by the name of Jan Karski who had a real hard time getting himself up to talking about what he had witnessed in the Warsaw Ghetto. I thought that his reaction to the relatively "tame" events and observations he shared were also out of sinc with the rest of the film.

"Shoah" is essential viewing for serious students of the Holocaust. The greater monstrosities are all there as well as the day to day life and the acceptance that their survival may have been as incomprehensible as the events they survived. There were a number of times during "Shoah" when the survivor is relating his observations almost non-challantly only to come to a point where a sudden reminder of a person, a comment, or an incident emotionally overwhelms them completely. After a moment or two of sheer anguish, the speaker continues on with his account as though nothing had interrupted his "presentation". The mixture of Humanity and inhumanity is the ultimate greatness of "Shoah". * PAL/Region 2 pressing.

* Please note you will need a Multi-Region/Multi-Format DVD player to view. This will not play on standard US DVD players/drives. If you don't know what this means, don't order this!

UK only Director approved edition includes a new progressive transfer, improved English sub-titles along with a 184-page book featuring writing by Stuart Liebman and analysis by Claurde Lamzman.

Shoah is Claude Lanzmann's landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: the geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand. Absent from the film is any imagery shot at the time the Holocaust occurred. There is only Lanzmann and his crew, filming in private spaces and now-dormant zones of eradication to extract testimony from a series of survivors, witnesses, and oppressors alike. Through his relentless questioning (aided on occasion by hidden camera), Lanzmann is able to coax out material of unparalleled emotional truth that constitutes both precious oral history and withering indictment. Shoah (the title is a common designation for the Holocaust, and a Hebrew word that can be translated as 'Catastrophe' or 'Annihilation') was the first of Lanzmann's films to analyse the effects of the death camps on individual lives and the world at large. It represents an aesthetic achievement in line with Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, combining inquiry, rage, and mourning to create a monumental portrait of shame and grief. Shoah locates within the present a direct line to the horrors of the past, and is widely regarded as one of the most powerful films of all time.