Revisiting Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in the Digital Age

In 1973, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann began work on what would become his landmark documentary Shoah (1985). Over the course of twelve years, he recorded more than 230 hours of interviews and location footage before shaping that material into the film’s nine-and-a-half-hour final version.

A little more than a decade after Shoah premiered, the unused footage was acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which spent more than twenty years restoring, preserving, and digitizing this extraordinary collection of audiovisual testimony. Today, the entire archive is available online.

In this lecture, Jennifer Cazenave explores the making of Shoah through the lens of this remarkable digital archive, revealing how the unused footage offers new perspectives on Lanzmann’s filmmaking process, Holocaust testimony, and the preservation of memory in the digital age.

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Speaker Bio

Jennifer Cazenave is Associate Professor of French and Film at Boston University. She is the author of An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which received an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She has published widely on documentary cinema, digital archives, and the representation of genocide. Her second book, Overlooked: Visualizing Disability Across the Eugenic Atlantic, is under contract with Columbia University Press.