A few years ago at a conference in Paris, I was present at a lecture in French, a language that I understand well enough, but which I speak only with great difficulty. The lecture dealt with the Egyptian-Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Edmond Jabès. Afterwards I wanted to ask a question, so I began speaking…
Claude Lanzmann, the French Jewish journalist, author, and filmmaker who died on July 5 at age 92, was not a believer in the proverb “live and let live.” As he explained in his memoir “The Patagonian Hare,” his celebrated film “Shoah” (1985) required aggressively pursuing Nazi murderers to demand explanations of their crimes. Fortunately, Lanzmann…
Over the course of his nearly fifty-year career as a filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann has traveled from the Middle East to the Nazi death camps. The 91-year-old documentary legend’s latest, “Napalm,” unexpectedly takes us to North Korea, where Lanzmann travelled in 1958 as part of the first Western delegation to be officially invited to the country…
BERLIN — Did a premier Berlin hotel cross Israel off its phone list? That’s what French Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann claims. His assertion has provoked a storm of controversy and drawn a firm denial from Hotel Bristol Kempinski. Writing for the newspapers Le Figaro in Paris and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Frankfurt, Lanzmann, the famed director of “Shoah” and…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably moderately aware that the 88th annual Academy Awards are on Sunday. The Jews will be making quite the appearance in the three-hour special: as nominees, presenters and plotlines. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” had nerds of all backgrounds hyperventilating with excitement last year. It also caught…
Adam Benzine, who directed the 40-minute documentary “Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah “was sitting with his aunt, uncle and producer in New York City watching the Oscar nomination live stream and waiting, and waiting some more, for the announcements. “It kind of amplifies the dread,” Benzine said of the extravagant ceremony. “I wish they…
There is much that is unusual about Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, which the master says will be his last. It takes place in our own world, not the mythical past of “Princess Mononoke” or the magical universe of “Spirited Away.” It has a mostly adult, male protagonist, unlike those in many of Miyazaki’s other movies….
“The Last of the Unjust” is at once a documentary on the Holocaust, a character portrait, an inquiry into the nature of evil, a rumination on drawing moral distinctions, and a lesson on the pedagogical limits of film. This well over three-hour documentary, directed — or should we say “constructed”? — by Claude Lanzmann, whose…
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