Shoah (and 4 Films After Shoah) - 4-Disc Box Set ( Shoah / Un vivant qui passe / Sobibór, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures / Le rapport Karski / Le dernier des injustes ) ( Shoah / A Visitor from the Living / Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m. / The Karski Report / The Last of the Unjust )

Shoah (and 4 Films After Shoah) - 4-Disc Box Set (Blu-Ray) (*)

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Original Title: Shoah / Un vivant qui passe / Sobibór, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures / Le rapport Karski / Le dernier des injustes
Alternate Title: Shoah / A Visitor from the Living / Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m. / The Karski Report / The Last of the Unjust
Screened, competed or awarded at:
BAFTA Awards
Berlin International Film Festival
Ceasar Awards
Rotterdam International Film Festival
Other Film Festival Awards

Language Selections:
English ( Subtitles )
Multi-lingual ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )

Product Origin/Format:
United Kingdom ( Blu-Ray/Region B )

Running Time:
1006 min

Aspect Ratio:
Fullscreen

Special Features:
Biographies
Box Set
Interactive Menu
Multi-DVD Set
Photo Gallery
Scene Access
Booklet

Movie filmed in 1985 - 2013 and produced in:
France ( France, Benelux )

Directed By:
Claude Lanzmann

Written By:
Claude Lanzmann

Actors:
Simon Srebnik ..... Himself
Michael Podchlebnik ..... Himself
Motke Zaidl ..... Himself
Hanna Zaidl ..... Herself
Jan Piwonski ..... Himself
Itzhak Dugin ..... Himself
Richard Glazer ..... Himself
Paula Biren ..... Herself
Pana Pietyra ..... Herself
Pan Filipowicz ..... Himself
Pan Falborski ..... Himself
Abraham Bomba ..... Himself
Czeslaw Borowi ..... Himself
Henrik Gawkowski ..... Himself
Rudolf Vrba ..... Himself
Maurice Rossel ..... Himself
Claude Lanzmann ..... Himself / Interviewer
Yehuda Lerner ..... Himself
Jan Karski ..... Himself (archive footage)
Benjamin Murmelstein ..... Himself

Synopsis:

Shoah [1985], a heroic endeavour to humanise the inhuman, to tell the untellable, and to explore in unprecedented detail the horrors of the past. A Visitor from the Living [1997] is based on an interview conducted by Lanzmann with Maurice Rossel during the filming of Shoah. A member of the Berlin delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross from 1942, Rossel was the only member of the organisation to have visited Auschwitz in 1943, and to have also paid a trip to the "model ghetto" of Theresienstadt in June 1944. Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4PM [2001] recounts the prisoner uprising that took place in the Sobibór death camp in Poland. The Karski Report [2010] is Lanzmann's brief film on Jan Karski, the Polish resistance figure who also featured in the final section of Shoah, and which recounts Karski's powerful testimonial given to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter on what he witnessed during a trip to the Warsaw Ghetto and to the extermination camp Belzec. The Last of the Unjust [2013], moves between 1975 and 2012, detailing Lanzmann's mid-'70s Rome interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto, and the filmmaker's own return to the location 37 years later providing an unprecedented insight into the genesis of the "Final Solution".

Shoah (1985)
The primary focus of Shoah is the stories of Holocaust survivors, perpetrators and witnesses. Instead of encompassing a traditional narrative document of these people, director Claude Lanzmann conducts in-depth interviews with his subjects, some of them, like SS Junior Sergeant (Unterscharfuhrer) Franz Suchomel and Franz Schalling, being filmed in secret. In all, the documentary encompasses over nine hours. Survivors that Lanzmann interviews include Simon Srebnik, a survivor of the Chelmno extermination camp, Abraham Bomba, a barber who cut the hair of women before they entered the gas chambers at Treblinka, and Rudolph Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz and for producing the most detailed information about the exterminations taking place at the camp. Perpetrators interviewed included the aforementioned Suchomel, who describes the processions of prisoners to the gas chambers at Treblinka. He also talks at length about the construction of additional gas chambers. Henryk Gawkowski talks about driving the trains that brought prisoners to Treblinka while consuming vodka supplied to him by the Nazis. Witnesses to the Holocaust include Jan Karski, who was charged by Jewish leaders in the Warsaw ghetto with informing the Allies of the mass exterminations and with trying to procure weapons for the uprising. Other witnesses include the then-living residents of Treblinka who talk about the Jewish residents being removed to the ghettos. In a famous scene, they discuss the events with Lanzmann while Simon Srebnik stands with them. Lanzmann also talks at great length with Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg who talks about the logistics used by the Nazis to transport the millions of victims to the camps via the rail system, the Reichsbann.
A Visitor from the Living (1999)
Claude Lanzmann interviews Maurice Rossel, a Swiss official of the International Red Cross during World War II, who wrote a favorable report of Theresienstadt, a "model" Jewish ghetto that was in reality a death camp.
Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001)
Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M. is an earnest journalistic endeavor, an important historical document, and a weighty account of a true story that merits public attention. It is not, however, an entertaining movie. Claude Lanzmann should be commended for recording Yehuda Lerner's description of his wartime experiences for posterity; furthermore, Lanzmann's decision to maintain a somber, almost meditative tone throughout the film is perfectly understandable given the subject matter. But the movie is rather dull to watch. Since Lanzmann couldn't base the film's visuals on archival footage of the Sobibor camp, he chose to rely on contemporary footage of the area and the train route that Lerner traveled to get there. This footage lacks a sense of immediacy or visceral impact, a problem that is exacerbated by the documentary's slow pace. The movie also relies heavily on interview footage of Lerner, whose impassive demeanor and subdued voice aren't particularly griping, although his comments demonstrate that he has both insight and a sense of humor. Unfortunately, the film's pace is slackened by the inclusion of both Lerner's comments in Hebrew and the translator's comments in French, which seems particularly gratuitous if you're watching the movie with English subtitles. The slowest part of the documentary, however, is its conclusion; it features a lengthy voice-over recitation of the numbers of victims brought at various times to Nazi concentration camps, accompanied only by the same list printed on the screen. This conclusion is indicative of Lanzmann's apparent belief that the gravity of his subject matter justifies occasionally lugubrious filmmaking. How much you appreciate his movie may depend on how much you agree with this attitude.
The Karski Report (2010)
Broadcast in 2010, The Karski Report focuses primarily on the meeting between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jan Karski in 1943, and on the transmission of information about the destruction of the Jews of Europe during World War II.
The Last of the Unjust (2013)
1975. In Rome, Claude Lanzmann filmed a series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadtghetto in Czechoslovakia, the only "Elder of the Jews"* not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Murmelstein fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, week after week for seven years, managing to help around 121,000 Jews leave the country, and preventing the liquidation of the ghetto. 2012. Claude Lanzmann, at 87 - without masking anything of the passage of time on men, but showing the incredible permanence of the locations involved - exhumes these interviews shot in Rome, returning to Theresienstadt, the town "given to the Jews by Hitler", a so-called model ghetto, but a ghetto of deceit chosen by Adolf Eichmann to dupe the world. We discover the extraordinary personality of Benjamin Murmelstein: a man blessed with a dazzling intelligence and a true courage, which, along with an unrivaled memory, makes him a wonderfully wry, sardonic and authentic storyteller. Through these three periods, from Nisko in Poland to Theresienstadt, and from Vienna to Rome, the film provides an unprecedented insight into the genesis of the Final Solution. It reveals the true face of Eichmann, and exposes without artifice the savage contradictions of the Jewish Councils.

Shoah (1985)
Shoah is Claude Lanzmann's landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: the geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand. Absent from the film is any imagery shot at the time the Holocaust occurred. There is only Lanzmann and his crew, filming in private spaces and now-dormant zones of eradication to extract testimony from a series of survivors, witnesses, and oppressors alike. Through his relentless questioning (aided on occasion by hidden camera), Lanzmann is able to coax out material of unparalleled emotional truth that constitutes both precious oral history and withering indictment. Shoah (the title is a common designation for the Holocaust, and a Hebrew word that can be translated as 'Catastrophe' or 'Annihilation') was the first of Lanzmann's films to analyse the effects of the death camps on individual lives and the world at large. It represents an aesthetic achievement in line with Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, combining inquiry, rage, and mourning to create a monumental portrait of shame and grief. Shoah locates within the present a direct line to the horrors of the past, and is widely regarded as one of the most powerful films of all time.
A Visitor from the Living (1999)
An interview with a WWII Red Cross official who wrote a glowing report on a Jewish ghetto-cum-death camp.
Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001)
Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m is comprised primarily of an interview Lanzmann conducted in 1979 with a Holocaust survivor named Yehuda Lerner about the uprising at Sobibor, a Nazi extermination camp in eastern Poland, the only successful Jewish-prisoner insurrection of the war. This film isn't just an epilogue to Shoah, it's a rebuttal to the dominant mythology of Jewish acquiescence and martyrdom, and as such, a critique of turning history into the comforts of fiction. It's historiography with a vengeance.
The Karski Report (2010)
The Shoah director's powerful new film about Jan Karski - the Polish resistance figure who attempted to expose the Warsaw Ghetto and Belzec, and met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.
The Last of the Unjust (2013)
A place: Theresienstadt. A unique place of propaganda which Adolf Eichmann called the "model ghetto", designed to mislead the world and Jewish people regarding its real nature, to be the last step before the gas chamber. A man: Benjamin Murmelstein, last president of the Theresienstadt Jewish Council, a fallen hero condemned to exile, who was forced to negotiate day after day from 1938 until the end of the war with Eichmann, to whose trial Murmelstein wasn't even called to testify. Even though he was without a doubt the one who knew the Nazi executioner best. More than twenty-five years after Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's new film reveals a little-known yet fundamental aspect of the Holocaust, and sheds light on the origins of the "Final Solution" like never before.

This product was added to our catalog on Sunday 15 March, 2015.

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