An exemple of archives of oral history exploited by cinema : Shoah

Shoah is a movie directed by Claude Lanzmann. It is a documentary movie based on testimonies of rescaped people of concentration camp. It released in 1985 and commmercialized around the World as the United States, United Kingdom. The movie lasts 613 minutes in french version.   

Claude Lanzmann is a journalist, a film director born in 1925. When he was 18, he engaged in French Resistance during the Second World War. He was the partner of Simone de Beauvoir between 1952 and 1959. He has jews origins and  is an intellectual engaged in politic. He was anticolonialist and he was one of inculped because he had signed “manifest of 121” which denounced repression on Algerian people exerced by the French. He was engaged in Israelite cause and he devoted a lot of time to find Nazi responsibles to judge them. He campaigns for the memory of Shoah to not  forget this horror.

Between 1975 and 1981, he shot interviews of rescaped person of concentration camp. Interview was sometimes obtained by ruse .Interviews represent more 220 hours of recordings. The final editing lasts 9hours and 30 minutes and it is composed by interviews and image of extermination and concentration camp. Unlikely Night and Fog (1956), Shoah doesn’t really show horror of concentration and extermination camps and lets speak of rescaped people who have to be quiet during several years after the  World War II. In the1970’s, studies about history of the  World War II  evolved and historians wanted to narrate horror of this War in particular, the Final Solution decided by Nazi system in 1942. Shoah released in 1985 and moved deeply the contemporary society. All of recordings are conserved in USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC). Archivists of this museum are responsible to classify, to treat and conserve these recordings. They realized a movie with interviews  exploited by Claude Lanzmann for his movie.

This movie is untitled Shoah: The Unseen interview and released in 2011. Claude Lanzmann has proposed also three other movies based on rest of interviews. These movies were released in 1997,2001 and 2010.  

A DVD for scholar group was edited and proposes sequences of 30 minutes of the movie Shoah.

Texts of interviews were published in a book and  prefaced by a Simone de Beauvoir's text.

 A lot of books  about the movie or written by witnesses  were published. Principal witnesses are notably, Jan Karsky, witness of gettho of Warsaw, Ruth Elias, surviving woman of Extermination camp of Auschwitz, but also ancient nazi responsibles were interviewed as  Dr Frantz Goesler, assistant of Heinz Auerswald, or Joseph Obernhauser , a nazi officer of Belzec camp.

This video is a trailer on Shoah realized for the 25th Anniversary of movie.

Gwendoline CLAY.