Doyen of the documentary film genre, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann was honoured with an Homage and awarded the Honorary Golden Bear for his lifetime achievement at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.
“I felt happy, moved and very proud about being honored with this Homage”, Lanzmann told EJP.
Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah (1985) made cinematic history as an “unparalleled masterpiece of commemorative culture”.
The nine-and-a-half hour documentary on the genocide of European Jews was screened in the Berlinale Forum in 1986 and received numerous international awards.
The preparation and film work for Shoah lasted nearly twelve years. In the film, Lanzmann shows only interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Shoah, including perpetrators, and visits sites of extermination, vividly calling into consciousness the unfathomable horrors of the Nazi genocide. He avoids all historical footage.
“Avoiding the use of historical footage intensifies the realness of this Shoah”, Lanzman told reporters just prior to the awards ceremony.
„Tombstones throughout Europe bear names of the dead whom have no graves. It is the lack of corpses which makes Shoah all the more real, because that is how it is in reality.“
Born in Paris in 1925 to Jewish parents, Claude Lanzmann fought in the Resistance, studied philosophy in France and Germany, and held a lectureship at the then newly founded Freie Universität Berlin in 1948/49.
His exploration of the Shoah, anti-Semitism and political struggles for freedom, particularly the Algerian independence movement, infused both his cinematic and journalistic work.
Lanzmann worked primarily as a journalist until the early 1970s, and remains the publisher of the magazine “Les Temps Modernes”, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, to this day. During the 1960s he belonged to the circle of intellectuals surrounding Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
His first cinematic work was made in 1972, the documentary Pourquoi Israël (Why Israel, France 1973), in which he illustrates the necessity of Israel's founding from the Jewish perspective.
In the film Tsahal, which screened in the 1995 Berlinale Forum, he focuses on women and men who serve in the Israeli Army.
Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures (France 2001), about the 1943 revolt in the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, was also screened in the Berlinale Forum, in 2002. Among Claude Lanzmann’s cinematic works are further films dealing with the genocide of European Jews and its living witnesses.