“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…
French documentary filmmaker and producer Claude Lanzmann will be honored at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival, where he spoke about filming his famous “Shoah” documentary. Lanzmann, 87, was expected to receive an Honorary Golden Bear for his lifetime achievement on Thursday evening. “I was happy, I was moved and I was proud,” Lanzmann told…
The incendiary and critically acclaimed new documentary, “The Act of Killing,” might at first seem to have little connection with the Jewish experience aside from the background of its director Joshua Oppenheimer: Its subjects are veterans of the 1965 massacres in Indonesia, during which 1,000,000 men, women and children were slaughtered over the course of…
Claude Lanzmann, director of the film “Shoah,” has been busy of late. In February, his documentary, “Karski Report,” about how a Polish resistance fighter tried to warn American officials of the Holocaust as it was happening, was released on DVD. Also in February, Lanzmann, who will turn 87 on November 27, encountered some resistance on…
Last week, the Forward reported that Turkey had selected a young Jewish pop singer as its representative to 2012’s Eurovision music competition — an oblique gesture of musical détente at a time of frosty relations between Israel and Turkey. Now, in a very different kind of cultural milestone, Turkish state television network TRT has announced…
Film still courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem On December 6 I attended a screening of “Shoah, the Unseen Interviews,” sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 epic is more than nine hours long and features interviews with 70 individuals from 220 hours of footage (no…
Is Adam Sandler’s next movie going to be about parking cars? Russian Jewish oligarch Roman Abramovich needs an entire island to house his art collection. Read an exerpt of Alfred Kazin’s journals, to be published this spring by Yale University Press. Michael Chabon has been elected director of The MacDowell Colony. How enigmatic Israeli music…
Stephen Hazan Arnoff reviews two new books on Bob Dylan. Joshua Furst goes to see the current revival of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” Philologos tries out Cockney rhyming slang. Benjamin Ivry watches the films of documentarian and social critic Frederick Wiseman. Gerald Sorin examines a collection of new American Jewish fiction. Devra Ferst looks…
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