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Claude Lanzmann’s 'Shoah' Outtakes: Holocaust Rescue and Resistance
As we approach the end of the 'era of the witness', given the passing on of the generation of Holocaust survivors, Claude Lanzmann's archive of 220 hours of footage excluded from his ground-breaking documentary Shoah (1985) offers a remarkable opportunity to encounter previously unseen interviews with survivors and other witnesses, recorded in the late 1970s.
Although the archive is all available freely to view online and includes extra footage of those who appear in Shoah , this book focuses on the interviews from which no extracts appear in the finished film or in any subsequent release. The material analysed features interviews with such significant figures as the former partisan Abba Kovner, wartime activist Hansi Brand, Kovno Ghetto leader Leib Garfunkel, rescuer Tadeusz Pankiewicz and members of Roosevelt's War Refugee Board, and focuses throughout on the efforts at rescue and resistance by those within and outside occupied Europe.
Sue Vice contends that watching and analysing this wholly excluded footage gives us new insights into the making of Shoah through what was left out. Moreover, she reveals that the near-impossibility of rescue and often suicidal implications of resistance emerge through these excluded interviews as inextricable from the process of genocide. She concludes by arguing that the outtakes show the potential for new filmic forms envisaged on Lanzmann's part in order to represent the crucial topics of attempted Holocaust rescue and resistance.
Although the archive is all available freely to view online and includes extra footage of those who appear in Shoah , this book focuses on the interviews from which no extracts appear in the finished film or in any subsequent release. The material analysed features interviews with such significant figures as the former partisan Abba Kovner, wartime activist Hansi Brand, Kovno Ghetto leader Leib Garfunkel, rescuer Tadeusz Pankiewicz and members of Roosevelt's War Refugee Board, and focuses throughout on the efforts at rescue and resistance by those within and outside occupied Europe.
Sue Vice contends that watching and analysing this wholly excluded footage gives us new insights into the making of Shoah through what was left out. Moreover, she reveals that the near-impossibility of rescue and often suicidal implications of resistance emerge through these excluded interviews as inextricable from the process of genocide. She concludes by arguing that the outtakes show the potential for new filmic forms envisaged on Lanzmann's part in order to represent the crucial topics of attempted Holocaust rescue and resistance.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published June 3, 2021
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About the author
Sue Vice
19 books1 followerMore recently I have developed my enthusiasm for cinema-going into teaching film courses, and in 1993 I completed an MA in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University.
I have been interested in representations of the Holocaust for many years, and have developed this into teaching at undergraduate and graduate level, as well as several books on Holocaust literature and film. Between 2007 and 2011, I was Head of the School of English.
Research interests
I am influenced by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and my research background is in the work of Malcolm Lowry. My publications in the field of literary theory include Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (1996) and Introducing Bakhtin (1997).
In relation to the Holocaust, I have written about such subjects as novels, in Holocaust Fiction (2000), children´s perspectives, Children Writing the Holocaust (2004), Claude Lanzmann’s classic film Shoah (a BFI Modern Film Classics volume in 2011), and, with Jenni Adams, have edited a volume entitled Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013). book, Textual Deceptions (2014), is on the topic of false memoirs and literary hoaxes. My longstanding engagement with representation of memory has prompted my more recent investigation of the literature of memory-loss and dementia.
My interest in film and television archives led to my 2009 book Jack Rosenthal, and, with David Forrest, Barry Hines: ‘Kes’, ‘Threads’ and Beyond (2017). I have a British Academy Senior Fellowship (2019-20) to write a study of the outtake footage from Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah.
I have been interested in representations of the Holocaust for many years, and have developed this into teaching at undergraduate and graduate level, as well as several books on Holocaust literature and film. Between 2007 and 2011, I was Head of the School of English.
Research interests
I am influenced by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and my research background is in the work of Malcolm Lowry. My publications in the field of literary theory include Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (1996) and Introducing Bakhtin (1997).
In relation to the Holocaust, I have written about such subjects as novels, in Holocaust Fiction (2000), children´s perspectives, Children Writing the Holocaust (2004), Claude Lanzmann’s classic film Shoah (a BFI Modern Film Classics volume in 2011), and, with Jenni Adams, have edited a volume entitled Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013). book, Textual Deceptions (2014), is on the topic of false memoirs and literary hoaxes. My longstanding engagement with representation of memory has prompted my more recent investigation of the literature of memory-loss and dementia.
My interest in film and television archives led to my 2009 book Jack Rosenthal, and, with David Forrest, Barry Hines: ‘Kes’, ‘Threads’ and Beyond (2017). I have a British Academy Senior Fellowship (2019-20) to write a study of the outtake footage from Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah.
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