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| Shoah | 
 enlarge | Director: Claude Lanzmann
Actor: William Lubtchansky
Studio: New Yorker Video
Category: DVD
List Price: $149.99
Buy New: $121.91
You Save: $28.08 (19%)
Buy New/Used from $97.87
Avg. Customer Rating:  (29 reviews)
Sales Rank: 34518
Format: Box Set, Black & White, Color, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), French (Original Language), German (Original Language), Hebrew (Original Language), Polish (Original Language), Yiddish (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Italian (Subtitled)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD
Running Time: 566 minutes
Number Of Items: 4
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 156730317X
UPC: 717119510343
EAN: 9781567303179
ASIN: B00005JM8V
Release Date: October 7, 2003
Theatrical Release Date: November 1985
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
To write a review of a film such as Shoah seems an impossible task: how to sum up one of the most powerful discourses on film in such a way as to make people realize that this is a documentary of immense consequence, a documentary that is not easy to watch but important to watch, a documentary that not only records the facts, but bears witness. We are commanded "Never forget"; this film helps us to fulfill that mandate, reverberating with the viewer long after the movie has ended. Yes, Holocaust films are plentiful, both fictional and non-, with titles such as The Last Days, Schindler's List, and Life Is Beautiful entering the mainstream. But this is not a film about the Holocaust per se; this is a film about people. It's a meandering, nine-and-a-half-hour film that never shows graphic pictures or delves into the political aspects of what happened in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, but talks with survivors, with SS men, with those who witnessed the extermination of 6million Jews. Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years tracking people down, cajoling them to talk, asking them questions they didn't want to face. When soldiers refuse to appear on film, Lanzmann sneaks cameras in. When people are on the verge of breaking down and can't answer any more questions, Lanzmann asks anyway. He gives names to the victims--driving through a town that was predominantly Jewish before Hitler's time, a local points out which Jews owned what. Lanzmann travels the world, speaking to workers in Poland, survivors in Israel, officers in Germany. He is not a detached interviewer; his probings are deeply personal. One man farmed the land upon which Treblinka was built. "Didn't the screams bother you?" Lanzmann asks. When the farmer seems to brush the issues aside with a smile, Lanzmann's fury is noticeable. "Didn't all this bother you?" he demands angrily, only to be told, "When my neighbor cuts his thumb, I don't feel hurt." The responses, the details are difficult to hear, but critical nonetheless. Shoah tells the story of the most horrifying event of the 20th century, not chronologically and not with historical detail, but in an even more important way: person by person. --Jenny Brown
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| Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...
 A monumental examination of mankind's darkest period October 17, 2008
Shoah is too exhaustive a study (9 1/2 hours in length) to be considered the definitive Holocaust documentary. In 30 minutes, Night and Fog, Resnais' searing masterpiece gives us a concise picture of that awful period with images that are etched in our minds with the psychic equivalent of a branding iron. Lanzmann's effort is not about images anyway. It is about words. Words from people who lived through the nightmare. That's not to say there aren't images here that lacerate the heart of any reasonable and compassionate human being. These images however, are not of walking skeletons, or corpses piled up and tossed into mass graves, but of people reliving moments too horrible for the brain to process rationally.
Lanzmann interviews a few Jewish workers at Chelmno, who somehow miraculously escaped the fate of all their relatives and friends in the gas vans. He interviews a barber who cut the hair of people who minutes later were gassed at Treblinka. He talks to Filip Muller, one of the Sonderkommando (special detail) at Auschwitz, a Czech Jew who had to clean out the gas chambers and cremate the bodies. He also interviews a former Nazi guard at Treblinka (who doesn't know his testimony is being recorded for posterity) as well as a former high Nazi official responsible for maintaining the Warsaw ghetto prior to it's liquidation, whose failure to take any responsibility is notable. Lanzmann talks to Greek Jews who were shipped to Auschwitz and lost families. He talks to Poles who now live in homes once owned by Jews, or who lived near Treblinka and could hear screams at night. One of the most poignant interviews is with Jan Karski, a former Polish resistance fighter and liason to the government in exile, whose job it was to spread the word of the Jewish extermination to a world that basically didn't care enough to do anything to end the slaughter before the war ended in Europe. Karski gives a heartrending account of a tour through the Warsaw ghetto. Finally, Lanzmann interviews 2 survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, resistance fighters who have the cruel memories forever etched on their faces.
Shoah was a monumental undertaking, and it really should be used as a tool to educate young people worldwide..educate them on the depths of depravity a so called civilized society can sink to under the right conditions, and educate them on what it means to have a conscience, and live with the moral, and ethical values necessary to be considered part of the human race.
 Problems with DVD September 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Disc 1 has problems. During chapter 40 the film freezes and won't play that chapter beyond the point where it freezes unless you skip ahead to the next chapter. Haven't watched the remaining discs yet, so I'm not aware of any other problems with the other discs.
I've emailed the company to get a replacement copy and they have yet to respond.
Very frustrating especially for such a large ticket item and an amazing film.
The Banality of Evil August 11, 2008
In this carefully crafted documentary, Claude Landzman has shown all who have the willingness to listen and watch the tragic consequences of not believing ones own experience of events. Over and over the Germans, Poles, and others interviewed expressed their incredulity over what was transpiring before their very own eyes. Landzman is able to shine the light of day on the cultural anti-semitism that has become so pervasive in Europe that while it is expressed in genocide it is denied by those who witnessed, allowed and participated in it. The casual, matter of fact descriptions of the eye witness to mass murder are chilling. The attitude of the German guards, truck drivers and SS men is business-like. Over and over again the theme reverberates in the viewers mind, there were millions of people crying, screaming and then there was silence... a perfect silence. They were gone, they never were, where did they go. The Polish train engineer who had to get drunk everyday to go to work, the German Camp officer who spoke of his commander Capt. Wirth, beating his officers and men when they balked at their horrible tasks. The relish some of these people showed some forty years after the events in describing the "primitive but efficient assembly line of death" at Chelmo, Belzec and Treblinka.
The most remarkable feat of documentary cinematography is Lanzman's ability to capture the complete "normality" of these men and women. They do not fit the stereotype of the evil they perpetrated. The viewer will be amazed at the small scale of each of the murder camps and how hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were "processed" 50, 100 and 200 at a time.
This film should be required viewing for anyone who hates in the plural, who dismisses Christian, Muslim, Jew, Romany, Gay, Mentally Ill or Mentally Challenged, Communist, Socialist, as not quite human. Yesterday it was us, today it is them, tomorrow it is you.
Shoah June 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the most powerful work of documentation. I doubt if much more can be said about it.
Essential Holocaust Study September 13, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Extremely moving and deeply disturbing personal testimony of various Holocaust survivors and perpetrators - this video is a must for anyone seriously studying the apparatus of the Final Solution. Concentration camp inmates who were witness or trustys of the gas chambers and crematoria describe the daily operations of mass-murder in vivid detail. Producer/director Lanzmann is subtly vindictive in his interviews of former SS guards and officials, who are frequently evasive in discussing their involvement and culpability - this stereotypical behavior has become almost a parody to anyone familiar with cinematic representations of Germans/Nazis of that era, and it is interesting to see the root of these long-standing stereotypes in living color.
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