SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

BallWubba Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Sergeant_Tibbs It goes without saying that a mammoth film like Shoah can't be summed up in a simple review. It shouldn't really be reviewed as a film, it's more of an educational piece. At 9 and a half hours straight, it's a documentary that can't be consumed in one day. It would weigh too heavily on your shoulders. I scattered my viewing over the course of a few weeks which is the ideal way to take it, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten the first half. However, in saying that, its most powerful moments come in its last two hours as it features contributors breaking down and explores familiar places, such as the White House, in the style we've seen Treblinka. By virtue of its content, it's captivating. There are only so many tragic stories of Jewish victims you can take in a certain amount of time but Shoah treats them all with the respect and attention they deserve. It's flawed filmmaking however. The problem is that it lacks structure. It wouldn't feel as laborious if each hour was broken by topic, but instead it flows from topic to topic without much reason, sometimes coming back, sometimes telling something slightly related.It is indeed in Lanzmann's passionate thoroughness that bites back at him. It doesn't hold the film back necessarily, but it could've felt like a more complete piece. It's length largely comes down to its slow pacing due to the fact that Lanzmann does not speak many of the languages the interviewers speak, particularly in the first half. As a result, everything has to be filtered twice through an interpreter, who's really telling us the story for the most part. Any slight misinterpretation or change of emphasis is down to her so she deserved quite a bit of credit. The most polarising interview is certainly the one with a Nazi who proudly gives details of concentration camp conditions. An unmistakably vile human being you can't take your eyes off. But it's a film that makes you angry and makes you sad, as the camera catches some very emotional interviewees at their most vulnerable moments. Its editing method may make the film unnecessarily scattered, but it paints a rich picture of a terrible period in human history. Admirable and essential viewing.8/10

lufts I will leave the technical details of this devastating film to the description on the title page and the other reviewers, but what amazes me is how completely the other reviewers have missed the entire point of Lanzmann's epic.A bit of context is critical. Despite what we now know about the Holocaust, the Shoah, in the 1980's things were quite different. For the first 2 decades after the end of the war and the earliest of the Nuremberg trials, the German death factories and their hideous results were little talked about.The allies were busy recruiting ex Nazis either for their rocket or military programs, intelligence agencies, etc, and the survivors were first living in relocation camps all over Europe and then trying simply to rebuild their lives and put their personal tragedies behind them.And then came the Eichmann trial in Israel, which shocked the world, and was really the first time that survivors started to talk. (In fact, David Ben Gurion specifically wanted the trial for exactly that reason. He knew it needed to be talked about so that the new generation would learn about what had happened).Lanzmann began his work on the film not that long after that trial, and it was in response to the excuse that Eichmann used. "I was just following orders" and to the prevailing attitude about who and what was responsible for the world's first scientifically planned, and methodically executed genocide.The common thread through from then and into the 1980's was that most of the German, Polish, Czech, Ukranian, etc, people were innocent victims of the minority of the Germans that were fanatical Nazis and thus were absolved of responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust.Now, Dwight Eisenhower knew this to be false, which is why he ordered the townspeople surrounding the German camps to be paraded through them by the allied troops and to bury, individually, the victims that had not been incinerated.Lanzman was really the first scholar, and I use that term intentionally, because Shoah is nothing if not a scholarly work, to begin the process of exploding this myth.The complicity of most of the populations of Central and Eastern Europe in this horrid stain on human history was most famously exposed in Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (released 12 years after "Shoah")which investigates the endemic antisemitism throughout this part of Europe and how Hitler's rantings were descended upon a more than willing audience.And THAT is Lanzmann's brilliance. Through their own words, he demonstrates clearly that not only were those in the areas of these camps fully aware of what was happening, but fully complicit in it. And more frightening is that even knowing what happened, and the unimaginable results, their attitudes, in many cases have not changed.With each interview, and each admission, Lanzmann slowly breaks down the myth of the innocent countryside population. "We didn't know" unfolds until "We knew, and we were involved" is the obvious answer.Lanzmann's work is not only a great film, but it is really a must see in the true definition of that word.

Rodrigo Amaro "Shoah" is a Hebrew word for 'destruction', and that's what the Holocaust was, a genocide, the destruction of religions, cultures, ideologies, etc. The documentary directed by Claude Lanzmann is a heartfelt and powerful labor of preserving the tragic and real stories of people involved in one or way or another in one of the most darkest periods of the 20th century. In its long 9 and half hours you're gonna be informed in a way you've never were before, since the film does not make use of archive footage of any kind, and to most of the accounts revealed here you're gonna need to imagine how things were, how things happened and the director gives you time and space to form those desperate moments, thankfully to a slow pace and the presentation of places where part of the genocide happened, abandoned locations that seemed to be doomed to never have another function than of being a crime scene. In all of those hours and minutes of this experience you're gonna be sad, angered, dry, a little bit tired, intrigued, amazed, whatever reactions you may think of you might feel it watching this film.This is what we get: the movie presents three categories of people: the survivors of concentration camps, Jewish rebels working for the resistance; the perpetrators of the most horrendous crimes of the century, Nazi officers; and eyewitness who witnessed or were forced to pass through the horrors of war. In the latter category you'll see figures like the Polish train conductor who had to be drunk while making his service for the Nazists, transporting Jews on the worst possible conditions, otherwise he couldn't bear hearing the suffering people was going through.What the survivors have to say to us is impressively shocking but not just that; it's the way some of them express their suffering, their tragedies and losses: some of them explain things with a nice smile on their face. We ought to be amazed with that but there's a reason for it, they survived a time when most of them had the same thought of dying in the camps. Some had the frightening thought of being the last living Jew on Europe. Their testimonies are heartbreaking, very compelling, specially the ones when they can't even continue to be interviewed by the director, tears on their faces, voices almost unheard. But they go on. As one of the interviewed says: "I understand what your movie is trying to do" in the way he knows this is an important document that needs to be documented for future generations who must not be ignorant about what the Holocaust was.Secretly filmed, there's the stories told by Nazi officers and guards of how they conducted their "operations" of exterminating the Jews, how everything was carefully planed in the gas chambers, furnaces, executions, and disposing thousands of bodies. And what they have to share, almost running on a tangent, is simply the fact of they being people who were following orders, they never knew anything beforehand but they went along with the killings. Did they ever show some remorse for what they've done? Did they express some emotion while talking about executing people for no reason? No, never, not in this movie. It's interesting to see how some people with no kind of ideology can be easily guided for doing the most disgusting and vile possible acts like murdering millions of people. 9 and a half hours long but it worths all the while. I watched the whole experience, made a few minor pauses whose totality haven't reached five minutes long, since it's one of those things you don't want to get out of it. My advice to you is don't do what I did, instead, watch in the segments (after all the film is divided in three long ones). It's exhaustive, long, but never boring, never uninteresting, just a little excessive. The problems I had while watching it was some unnecessary moments involving unnecessary questions made by the director about the feelings the Poles had about the Jewish people, if they missed their presence in their life, since now most of them are living now in what used to be Jewish houses. My other problem, and I know I'm not alone in this, was the translation of questions during the first part of the film, being included instead of being edited out. Why it was a problem? First you have the question made, then it is translated, then the answer appears in the foreign language, to finally be translated. By the time we know the answer we forgot the question made. This only happened in the first segment of the documentary. The reason the director did this was in order to not be manipulative, like many documentary pieces tend to be, we have the whole thing, the real article, it's history happening in front of us. The idea is good but it doesn't work much. Much could be edited, reduced, a more straightforward picture.It's intriguing how a piece of garbage like "Triumph of the Will" in its ridiculous and racist propaganda of the Nazism is a more known film, lauded as one of the greatest films ever made, while "Shoah" is barely mentioned anywhere. The 9 hours of this amazing documentary worths more than seeing boring marches and speeches over and over again of the cult Riefensthal film. Both are important documents but "Shoah" is more than that, it's an experience that reveals not only the most horrific side of mankind but also to show how hope can survive, how strong and positive the human being can be in the most depressive and helpless of times. The experience stays with you after a long time. 9/10

Jackson Booth-Millard 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die is a very reliable reference book featuring some good choices, and I saw this film both for that reason, and because of the length. This documentary from director Claude Lanzmann focuses on the horrific events during the Holocaust, where over six million Jewish people were exterminated. He interviews all the people that are still alive during this time in the Second World War who witnessed parts of if not all of it, including traumatised survivors, people living near the death camps, and very controversially, ex-Nazis who only agreed to be heard but are secretly filmed. We see these people speaking the director's language of French, but there is also some German and Polish language amongst, and some translated on the spot by the director's translator, but don't worry, there is some English too. We see all the locations of death camps and train lines leading to them, e.g. Auschwitz, Chelmno, as they look in the present (sometimes covered in snow, but no matter). What makes this documentary really interesting besides the stories of the people interviewed, is the fact that not one single frame of archive footage (if any exists) is used to portray the horror of these times. At about nine and a half hours long, you may struggle to keep our eyes open throughout the entire thing, but at the same time, you want to hear about these unimaginably horrific incidents. If if it wasn't so long I may give it a slightly higher rating, but don't worry, I don't deny the critics are right to give it five stars, the director did take a decade to complete his film, so it is a must see documentary. It won the BAFTAs for the Flaherty Documentary Award and the Flaherty Documentary Award (TV). Very good!