SHOAH (AND 4 FILMS AFTER SHOAH) (Eureka blu-ray).
This four-disc set starts with Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour ‘documentary’ about the Holocaust. The word is in inverted commas as it’s a description the director himself rejects. It’s a collage comprising interviews with victims, perpetrators and innocent, and not-so-innocent, bystanders of the Nazi concentration camps.
Testimony is sometimes heard over slow tracking shots of peaceful landscapes which were the site of appalling atrocities; an SS officer is secretly videotaped describing the workings of the Final Solution; a Polish man claims that a rabbi told his congregation that they were to be sent to the death camps because they were collectively responsible for the death of Christ.
A work of art as much as a record of historical facts — even that shopworn word ‘masterpiece’ seems inadequate. Also included in the set is LAST OF THE UNJUST, a fascinating series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, a Jewish community leader who found himself having to negotiate with the Nazis in order to save Jews and was subsequently accused of being a collaborator.