Cazenave Presents her Book
Jennifer Cazenave presented her book, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, at the American University of Paris. In her talk, Jennifer told the story of the making of Shoah between 1973 and 1985, with a particular focus on Lanzmann’s engagement with debates surrounding the emergence of Holocaust memory in Israel, including the landmark Eichmann trial.
Jennifer is an assistant professor at BU Romance Studies. Her first book, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, undertakes a comprehensive examination of the 220 hours of filmic material Claude Lanzmann excluded from his 1985 Holocaust opus. In retrieving alternative eyewitness accounts captured by the camera but ultimately left on the cutting room floor, this book offers a voice to testimonies from the margins. It also addresses crucial questions raised by Lanzmann’s film, including the absence of a gendered experience of the Holocaust.