He is best know and most famous for his making of “SHOAH” his epic film which
chronicles the holocaust, with no archival footage whatsoever. Almost 10 hours in length making it consumed 12 years of his life .
With “Shoah” — Hebrew for catastrophe — Mr. Lanzmann upstaged everything he had done before. From its release in 1985, the film was internationally recognized as both an important historical record and an original, even beautiful, work of art — a nine-and-a-half-hour movie without a single frame of the by-then-familiar footage of the gas chambers or the living skeletons that Allied forces discovered in the Germans’ death camps.
Instead, Mr. Lanzmann tracked down and interviewed living witnesses: officers and bureaucrats who had run the camps; Jewish survivors, including veterans of the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto; and Polish townspeople in Treblinka, Chelmno and Oswiecim, where the Auschwitz camp was located.
The movie was completely mesmerizing….
He was visiting New York at the time, 85 years old and impatient as ever with efforts to “explain” the Holocaust or make uplifting entertainment from it. “To ask why the Jews have been killed,” he said in an interview with The Times, “is a question that shows immediately its own obscenity.”
All quotes are from NYTimes obit here: www.nytimes.com/...