Shoah

Sue Vice's study delves into Claude Lanzmann's monumental 1985 film, "Shoah," examining its significance as both a cinematic achievement and a profound representation of the Holocaust. The book explores how Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half-hour epic, distilled from over 350 hours of footage gathered across eleven years, tells the story of the Holocaust through direct interviews with survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators, deliberately avoiding archival footage or voiceovers. Vice's analysis offers close readings of key interviews and filmic techniques, emphasizing Lanzmann's commitment to detail and his assertion that "Shoah is a fight against generalities."

This book explores the film's background, its challenging production and financing, and the extensive editing process that led Lanzmann to conclude that the film's subject is "death itself; death and not survival." Vice also addresses Lanzmann's central role as director and interviewer, the ethical considerations of filming such sensitive material, and the film's enduring impact on Holocaust representation and subsequent cinematic works witnessing genocides. It offers insight into how "Shoah" represents the past not as a simple documentary, but as a "fiction of the real," existing powerfully in the present through eyewitness testimony and landscape.