Filmscreening in French language, with German subtitles
Directed by Claude Lanzmann | France 1974–85 | Documentary | OV (German subtitles) | 566 min | The film is screened in full length with appropriate breaks.
For more than ten years Claude Lanzmann worked on this now "classic" and at the same time monumental documentation of the systematic extermination of European Jews by the Nazis. After three and a half years of research and five years of shooting, the result of a four-year montage process was a nine-and-a-half hour film made from three hundred and fifty hours of material. The film shows no historical material and does not rely on optical shocks. Through extensive interviews with victims and perpetrators, meditative images of the scenes 40 years later, the film shows the events of the past as reflected in the present.
A documentary that does not collect data or list figures, but rather involves the viewer in the process of remembering, confronting him or her with eyewitnesses in a direct and painful way, their silence broken by the insistent presence of the camera and the director's sympathetic persistence. Shoah is one of the most depressing and at the same time most impressive films about the death factories of the Third Reich, because it challenges the usual methods of "coming to terms with the past" and their cinematic presentation.
A film screening as part of the programme accompanying the exhibition "End of Contemporary Witnessing?", in cooperation with Spielboden Dornbirn.
Ticket Price: €18 / €15
Phone: +43 (0)5572 21933
Email: spielboden@spielboden.at
Source: Jewish Museum Hohenems