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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

Cazenave, Jennifer

Paperback

Series: Suny Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture

Film StudiesGeneral World HistoryHolocaust

ISBN10: 1438474768
ISBN13: 9781438474762
Publisher: St Univ Of New York Pr
Published: Jun 1 2019
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

Comprehensive analysis of 220 hours of outtakes that impels us to reexamine our assumptions about a crucial Holocaust documentary.

Honorable Mention, 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Claude Lanzmann's 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust-and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 91/2-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe, Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and, above all, gender-Lanzmann's twenty hours of interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film.

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