Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust documentary, Shoah, was meant to be an 'incarnation of the truth'. His new film responds to a threat to that truth
Claude Lanzmann went to Iran recently. "As you know," the 85-year-old director, a Jewish Frenchman, tells me in his Paris office, "Ahmadinejad doesn't believe there was a Holocaust. The Iranians wanted me to prove to them on television that there was. They wanted to see the corpses."
What did he tell them? The director of the nine-and-a-half hour documentary Shoah (1985) about the mass murder of Jews in Nazi death camps swivels round in his chair and fixes me. "I told them there's not a single corpse in Shoah. The people who arrived at Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor were killed within two or three hours and their corpses burned. The proof is not the corpses; the proof is the absence of corpses. There were special details...
Claude Lanzmann went to Iran recently. "As you know," the 85-year-old director, a Jewish Frenchman, tells me in his Paris office, "Ahmadinejad doesn't believe there was a Holocaust. The Iranians wanted me to prove to them on television that there was. They wanted to see the corpses."
What did he tell them? The director of the nine-and-a-half hour documentary Shoah (1985) about the mass murder of Jews in Nazi death camps swivels round in his chair and fixes me. "I told them there's not a single corpse in Shoah. The people who arrived at Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor were killed within two or three hours and their corpses burned. The proof is not the corpses; the proof is the absence of corpses. There were special details...
- 6/9/2011
- by Stuart Jeffries
- The Guardian - Film News
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