French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, best known for his 1985 film Shoah, has passed away. He was 92.
Lanzmann died this morning at a Paris hospital, but no further details have been released.
Lanzmann's film Shoah was filmed throughout the 1970s, illuminating haunting details of the Holocaust across nine and a half hours of original footage. Instead of relying on archival footage, he paired images of trains and the current barren Polish landscape where the atrocities against Jewish people were committed with interviews from Jewish victims, German perpetrators and Polish bystanders. The film was almost unanimously critically acclaimed.
In 2013, Lanzmann once again explored the Holocaust in a film called The Last of the Unjust. His final film, Napalm, arrived in 2017 and told the story of his visit to North Korea in the 1950s.
The child of French Jews, Lanzmann and his siblings were moved to a farm when the Second World War broke out. He eventually joined the Resistance.
He later had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir, whom he met through his intellectual idol Jean-Paul Sartre. Lanzmann lived with Beauvoir for much of the 1950s. In her autobiography, Beauvoir wrote of Lanzmann: "[He] seemed to be carrying the weight of a whole ancestral experience on his shoulders."
Lanzmann is survived by his wife Dominique and his daughter Angelique.
Lanzmann died this morning at a Paris hospital, but no further details have been released.
Lanzmann's film Shoah was filmed throughout the 1970s, illuminating haunting details of the Holocaust across nine and a half hours of original footage. Instead of relying on archival footage, he paired images of trains and the current barren Polish landscape where the atrocities against Jewish people were committed with interviews from Jewish victims, German perpetrators and Polish bystanders. The film was almost unanimously critically acclaimed.
In 2013, Lanzmann once again explored the Holocaust in a film called The Last of the Unjust. His final film, Napalm, arrived in 2017 and told the story of his visit to North Korea in the 1950s.
The child of French Jews, Lanzmann and his siblings were moved to a farm when the Second World War broke out. He eventually joined the Resistance.
He later had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir, whom he met through his intellectual idol Jean-Paul Sartre. Lanzmann lived with Beauvoir for much of the 1950s. In her autobiography, Beauvoir wrote of Lanzmann: "[He] seemed to be carrying the weight of a whole ancestral experience on his shoulders."
Lanzmann is survived by his wife Dominique and his daughter Angelique.
