Jennifer Cazenave Publishes Essay in L.A. Review of Books
Jennifer Cazenave, assistant professor in French, has published an essay in the L.A. Review of Books titled “Claude Lanzmann’s Ghosts“. The essay discusses the making of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental nine and a half hour film Shoah, focusing on the copious material that had to be excluded from the film. Cazenave writes:
[Lanzmann] devoted 12 years to making a film about the destruction of the European Jews, a film he described in 1977 as “a race against death” and against the imminent passing of witnesses. He also, between 1978 and 1979, captured the majority of the 230 hours of footage during a rushed shooting schedule, and he ensured that his archive of testimonies, initially scattered between his basement in Paris and the LTC film laboratory in the suburb of Saint-Cloud, would be salvaged from oblivion and preserved for perpetuity by the USHMM. After the release of Shoah, he never ceased to bring back the outtakes from the dead in order to make new documentaries.