“One doesn’t say‘Holocaust’ in Europe.
This was a catastrophe, a disaster.”

A quarter of a century after Claude Lanzmann’s documentary “Shoah” transformed the way the world regarded the Holocaust, the film was recently re-released in the United States - an event he welcomes as long overdue.

Then again, Mr. Lanzmann, 85, also argues that “Shoah” is not really a documentary, and that “Holocaust” is “a completely improper name” to describe the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews during World War II. He complains that, in contrast to Europe, where “Shoah” has “never stopped being shown in movie theaters and on TV,” his film has “disappeared from the American scene,” elbowed aside by more palatable fare and thus allowing mistaken notions to propagate.

“This was by no means a holocaust,” he said during a recent visit to New York, noting that the literal meaning of the word refers to a burnt offering to a god. “To reach God 1.5 million Jewish children have been offered? The name is important, and one doesn’t say ‘Holocaust’ in Europe. This was a catastrophe, a disaster, and in Hebrew that is ‘shoah.’ ”

Mr. Lanzmann is a French Jew who joined the Resistance as a teenager and later served as an editor of Les Temps Modernes, the cultural and philosophical journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. Though no members of his own family perished in the Holocaust, he said, the event latched hold of him when he began to make his film in 1973.

“After I started, I could not stop,” he said. “I was like a blind man during the 12 years of the making of ‘Shoah,’ like a horse with blinders. ”

At just over nine and a quarter hours, “Shoah” is drawn from more than 300 hours of film. “Shoah” should not be considered a documentary, he said, because “I did not record a reality that pre-existed the film, I had to create that reality,” out of what he calls “a kind of chorus of emerging voices and faces, of so many killers, victims and bystanders.”

“Shoah” has become the benchmark for visual representations of the Holocaust.

Since its release in 1985, of course, numerous films fictionalizing various aspects of the Holocaust have been issued , including a pair of Academy Award winners: Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful,” of which Mr. Lanzmann is dismissive, and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” which he sees as pernicious .

The Spielberg film is “ very sentimental,” he said.

“It’s false,” he added, because it offers an uplifting ending. Mr. Lanzmann is similarly impatient with efforts to explain the Holocaust. “To ask why the Jews have been killed is a question that shows immediately its own obscenity,” he said.

The political, moral and media landscape of the world has also changed considerably since the original release of “Shoah.” On the one hand, entities ranging from the government of Iran to the Institute for Historical Review openly promote Holocaust denial; on the other, more recent genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur may have lessened the Holocaust’s aura of uniqueness or even its power to shock.

“People talk about ‘soup Nazis,’ or if you don’t like the dogcatcher, he’s ‘the Gestapo,’ ” said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti- Defamation League. “T he re-release of ‘Shoah’ offers a very important and significant opportunity to refocus.”

Since the initial release of “Shoah,” Mr. Lanzmann has also made three satellite films , and is working on another. He also recently published a memoir, “The Patagonian Hare,” that has been a best seller in France .

“Most of those I interviewed are now deceased,” he said. “But ‘Shoah’ the film is not dead.”


By LARRY ROHTER