All I Had Was Nothingness

The 1985 film Shoah is a groundbreaking and utterly unique nine-hour-plus meditation on the earth-shattering evil of the Holocaust that collects eye-witness testimony from victims, perpetrators, and complicit bystanders. Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann culled his 12-years-in-the-making epic from endless hours of footage. With this new documentary, released on Shoah’s 40th anniversary, director Guillaume Ribot returns to this important work and pays homage to Lanzmann’s journey, telling the story of how he accomplished this feat and revealing never-before-seen excerpts from more than 200 hours of unreleased footage. The result is a tribute to a masterpiece and to the outsize personality of Lanzmann himself, as well as a revelation for followers of the filmmaker’s indefatigable archaeology of memory, a crucial addition to cinematic Holocaust scholarship.