Nev­er for­get this har­row­ing oral his­to­ry of the Holocaust

Cin­e­ma is a lan­guage, and those who use it should be able to say any­thing. Yet there are cer­tain words, terms and nuances so obscure and dif­fi­cult to enun­ci­ate that it’s per­haps best left to the schol­ars. No dra­mat­ic recre­ation, or even a care­ful­ly pre­sent­ed lat­tice of archive footage, could ever ful­ly express the true hor­rors of the Nazi war machine and the all-encroach­ing bru­tal­i­ty and humil­i­a­tion suf­fered by the Jews of Europe. And so, French film­mak­er (although the term ​‘film­mak­er’ seems an inad­e­quate descrip­tion of what he does) Claude Lanz­mann cre­at­ed an oral his­to­ry of World War Two atroc­i­ties with his eight-and-a-half hour mas­ter­piece from 1983, Shoah.

With­out mean­ing to sound crass, there is some­thing high­ly cin­e­mat­ic, in the old school show­man sense of the term, in the way Lanz­mann relies on inti­ma­tion and the breadth of human imag­i­na­tion rather than believ­ing some­thing he could con­coct in his head would be a more effec­tive recourse to appal. It’s why this incred­i­ble film stands as one of the most flinti­ly mag­is­te­r­i­al works of the mod­ern age, a howl­ing, bold­ed, under­lined, red-ink telegram from his­to­ry ask­ing that we should nev­er, ever for­get the bar­bar­ic out­rages that were met­ed out in the name of freedom.

Shoah is cur­rent­ly avail­able on Blu-ray and it comes in a box set with four bril­liant sup­ple­men­tary works made from footage that Lanz­mann shot while mak­ing the film, but which he felt didn’t gel with the its cen­tral the­sis and struc­ture. Two of the films exam­ine the ​“mod­el ghet­to” of There­sien­stadt, a town pre­sent­ed to the world as a paragon of cheer, only the inhab­i­tants had Nazi guns pressed to their back.

1999’s A Vis­i­tor from the Liv­ing is deliv­ered from the per­spec­tive of a Red Cross envoy who was fooled by a grotesque, Nazi-orches­trat­ed the­atre which (briefly) pre­sent­ed the town as a cheery lit­tle burg where every­thing was well. 2013’s Last of the Unjust exam­ines the impos­si­ble deci­sions made by a Rab­bi placed as one of the population’s main spokespeople.

The utter­ly har­row­ing Sobibór, 14 Octo­ber 1943, 4pm, from 2001. plays out with the cut-glass intrigue of a thriller, detail­ing an inno­v­a­tive and vio­lent escape plan from the Sobibór con­cen­tra­tion camp pri­or to its clo­sure. While 2010’s The Kars­ki Report detail Pol­ish diplo­mat Jan Karski’s meet­ing with Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt and his attempts to amply con­vey the hor­rors occur­ring in Europe. Per­haps more so than any oth­er achieve­ment in the cin­e­mat­ic form, Lanzmann’s suite of films beg that we ques­tion the motives of our arro­gant, igno­rant oppres­sors. They stand as a shin­ing human­ist bea­con for our col­lec­tive abil­i­ty to just remem­ber and, hope­ful­ly, learn from the mis­takes of the past.