Shoah: first era

Director Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ (the Hebrew word for destruction or annihilation), attempts to create in the present the reality of the Holocaust through the memories of its survivors, both victims and perpetrators. This remarkable documentary achieves this without a single use of archival or found footage, rather letting the horror of the Holocaust resonate through the myriad of stories and the faces of the survivors. Lanzmann and his documentary crew take their subjects through the now abandoned fields and buildings of their past torment, as they recount and talk the viewer through the unknowable and unthinkable. Images such as disused train tracks, overgrown with grass and leading nowhere take on a chilling and profound resonance as we are left to contemplate what happened there. Winner of the 1985 New York Film Critics Circle Award and the 1985 National Society of Film Critics Awards-USA.