Jennifer Cazenave Gives Lecture in Paris with the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information
Last week, as part of the Claude Lanzmann retrospective organized by the Bibliothèque publique d’information at the Centre Pompidou, Professor Jennifer Cazenave, Director of Undergraduate Studies in CIMS, traveled to Paris to give a public lecture on the largely unedited interviews with women survivors found in the outtakes of Lanzmann’s renowned documentary Shoah.
Still as part of this retrospective, she was in conversation with the historian Tal Bruttmann about the 220 hours of Shoah outtakes at the Mémorial de la Shoah.
Shoah is a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary film that presents an oral history of the Holocaust using no archival footage and only first-person testimonies from both the persecuted and the persecutors.
Professor Cazenave’s work on Shoah focuses primarily on the 220 hours of footage that he did not include in his original film. This footage is preserved and archived at the Yad Vashem in Israel and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. Lanzmann continued to work with the archival footage and make multiple additional films until his death in 2018.
Professor Cazenave was recently quoted in Le Monde about Shoah, and it is the subject of her first book, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. She also published an article with Balises, BPI’s magazine publication, about the creation of Shoah and the unused footage.