Aladdin Library

Born on November 27, 1925, in Bois-Colombes, a suburb northwest of Paris, Claude LANZMANN is a journalist, writer and filmmaker. From 1943, at the age of 18, he joined the Resistance in Clermont-Ferrand. From 1952 to 1959, he was the partner of Simone de Beauvoir and succeeded her in 1986 as the editor of the review The Modern Times, a position he still holds after more than five decades.
He is the director of "Shoah," a nine-and-a-half hour documentary on the extermination of European Jews in the Nazi camps, which was broadcast for the first time in 1985. As soon as released, the film enjoyed a resounding success and stood out immediately as a great masterpiece of the Seventh Art. LANZMANN devoted 11 years to the production of the film "Shoah". Shot in the years 1976-1981, the film consists of interviews with witnesses of the Holocaust and of shots made at the scene of the genocide.
According to Simone de Beauvoir: "Neither fiction nor documentary, Shoah succeeds in recreating the past with very limited means: places, voices and faces. The great art of Claude LANZMANN lies in making the places to talk, in reviving them through the voice, and, beyond the words, in expressing the unspeakable by faces".