In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz Liberation, the Center for German and European Studies hosted the Boston area screening of the Goethe Institut’s worldwide screening of the 9 1/2 hour documentary “Shoah” in Wasserman Cintematique on Tuesday.
The screening started at 10 a.m. and ended at 9 p.m. with three breaks in between. People were able to enter and leave the documentary at any time they wished, but after the documentary ended, a number of audience members shared that they had been in the cinema for the whole film. After the documentary, Professor Sabine von Mering (GRALL/ENVS/WGS) moderated a post-screening reflection with Professor Sharon Rivo (NEJS), Professor Thomas Doherty (AMST) and Executive Adviser of Graduate Student Affairs Cheyenne Paris (NEJS).
Directed by Claude Lanzmann, “Shoah” was released in 1985 after nearly 11 years in the making. When the documentary was first released, reviewers initially claimed that it would die in the box office, according to Rivo. “Shoah” would later surprise those same reviewers when the film ultimately booked over two million and was later distributed by New Yorker Films.
“In those days, if something like this happened, you couldn’t expect to get it on Blu-ray or Netflix,” Doherty said. “This was a real event.”
According to Rivo, the documentary’s success could also be explained by the fact that it “had tremendous impact on opening to a new generation the story of the Holocaust.”
“Shoah” relies solely on the interviews of survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Audience members are pulled into the stories of Chelmno and Auschwitz, of Treblinka and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. When the documentary was first released, papers such as The New York Times caught on to how “Shoah” was not like “the conventional documentary composed of newsreel footage.” As a result, Lanzmann “respooled that [Holocaust] footage…to give a different kind of historical experience,” Doherty said.
“There’s no way [Shoah] should be cut,” Rivo said when an audience member asked if there could be a way to shorten the documentary. “It’s not the same as watching it on television, watching it on the VCR….It holds this incredible power of people [Lanzmann] has found for us…speaking in a way of both emotion as well as information as well as history, which is really what the [documentary] is all about.” Von Mering also said that “Shoah” presents the story “in ways that you just realize…there’s so much more to tell.”
Besides providing information and history, however, “Shoah” gives the audience a way to “talk about [the Holocaust] and continue these conversations by showing movies that bring this information in a responsible way,” said Paris. Rivo and Paris both said that there was an assortment of good fiction that introduced the conversation of the Holocaust to new generations, but Paris also said that it’s important to “make sure we don’t just stop at one story.”
Even after the discussion panel ended, a number of audience members talked with one another to share extra resources on how to delve deeper into the history of the Holocaust, and further recommendations of Lanzmann’s other documentaries—which were actually made up of the unused footage of “Shoah”—were also shared.
In addition to the Goethe Institut and the Center for German and European Studies, the “Shoah” screening was also co-sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies; the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature; the Department of English; the Brandeis International Business School and the National Center for Jewish Film, among many others.
