Claude Lanzmann’s 'Shoah': The never-ending task of witnessing

Abstract

This article aims to consider the relevance of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah in two dimensions. First, we analyse its links to the elaboration of the Nazi practices of the extermination of European Jewry and its forms of transmission, with an emphasis on witnessing, connecting it to the conformation of the testimonial genre and its operations in the context of memory practices; we also refer to contemporary works of art that follow the aesthetics path opened by the film. Secondly, we reflect on Shoah as a discursive event, inseparable from the uniqueness of the history and memory it seeks to recount. We conclude by emphasizing some of the key witnesses who give the film its power to transmit what these people have to say, and that listening to them remains a current, never-ending task, especially given the continuity of injustice and various forms of man-made catastrophes.