French Director Claude Lanzmann, whose 9½-hour masterpiece "Shoah" bore unflinching witness to the Holocaust through the testimonies of Jewish victims, German executioners and Polish bystanders, has died at the age of 92.
"Shoah" is widely considered one of, if not the, most important documentaries ever made about the Holocaust. The film took Lanzmann some 11 years to make.
The director's death was confirmed by his family to French daily Le Monde.
Gallimard, the publishing house for Lanzmann's autobiography, said he died Thursday morning at a hospital in Paris. It gave no further details.
The power of "Shoah," filmed in the 1970s during Lanzmann's trips to the barren Polish landscapes where the slaughter of Jews was planned and executed, was in viewing the Holocaust as an event in the present, rather than as history. It contained no archival footage, no musical score – just the landscape, trains and recounted memories.
