Shoah Quotes

“Elements of Shoah are cited to more questioning than reverential effect in Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi’s Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine–Israel (2004). Like Shoah, this film includes an interview with a barber who describes a massacre while he cuts a customer’s hair – but this time it is a Palestinian barber in the Israeli town of Dod, and the massacre is one that took place in 1947 in which Palestinians were the victims, Israelis the perpetrators. This sequence is an ambivalent homage to Lanzmann’s encounter with Abraham Bomba in Shoah. It is an intertextual moment that, Sivan argues, does not seek to demonstrate the comparability of the Holocaust and the Palestinian view of the founding of the state of Israel, but the fact that the two events are ‘historically continuous and contiguous, part of a single historical process’.”
― Sue Vice, Shoah

“Lanzmann has entered into a debate with Jean-Luc Godard, initially about the citation of archive material in film, which has expanded to address film-making more generally. Where Lanzmann claimed that in the unlikely event of film footage of the gas chambers coming to light he would destroy it, Godard insisted that a good researcher could locate this ‘missing reel’, and accused Lanzmann of following Adorno’s role in forbidding certain kinds of Holocaust representation. Godard has observed of Shoah that its failure is that the spectator sees ‘nothing’, and that Lanzmann is interested in dialogue at the expense of mise en scène.”
― Sue Vice, Shoah

“Shoah takes as its title the Hebrew word for ‘whirlwind’ or ‘catastrophe’, although originally Lanzmann called it simply ‘Holocauste’. Naming it thus in Hebrew conveys its specific focus on the Jewish victims of the Nazis’ genocidal actions. Some commentators have criticised Lanzmann’s choice for this reason, or because in its biblical context the word refers only to natural disaster. Annette Wieviorka notes simply that, ‘because the word “Holocaust” means “burnt offering” French scholars prefer “Shoah”, taken from the title of Claude Lanzmann’s film’, acknowledging Shoah’s profound influence on the terms of debate. However, it seems that Lanzmann is not drawing on the word’s etymology but giving it a new definition, and one that has been widely adopted in writings on the Holocaust: it refers specifically to the mass killing of Europe’s Jews. Within this, Shoah’s central concern is with the death camps and the precise methods of industrialised killing.”
― Sue Vice, Shoah