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ShoahRating:
Release Date: 07 October, 2003 Retail Price: $149.99 OUR Price: $134.99 You SAVE: $15.00! Cast: |
Shoah Reviews
Brilliant, brutal, but necessary
After the Holocaust most survivors' chose for their memories to remain unspoken. They opted to repress the horror and move on with what remnant of life they could. Fortunately, their silence did not persist, for if it did, enemies of humanity who choose to falsify and revise history, declaring the Holocaust never existed, would be armed with devastating ammunition..."where is the victims' testimony?".
With Shoah we finally get to hear, en masse, the devastating account of civilization's most heinous crime. While every memory of the horror cannot be captured, most, like the unfortunate lives consumed in the madness, are lost for ever. Yet gratefully we have this document to mark society beginning to come to terms with and document honestly what humanity is capable of.
As the last survivors are rapidly dying off with age, soon we will be without first hand witnesses. Thankfully through Shoah and other efforts, we are documenting and preserving in perpetuity the Holacaust to forever encase the evidence in an envelope of truth and righteousness where it forever belongs. Let Shaoh along with Yad Vashem, The Sorrow and the Pity, and the precious few other venues of masterpiece historical documentation persevere. They have captured the immense odiousness, horror, insanity, and pure evil that humanity is capable of and should not only never be forgotten but taught to all presently and for posterity so all of humanity can bear witness. Only through dedicated vigilance to awareness can we hope to avoid recurrence.
Important documentary with some shortcomings
Because of the sheer length of this documentary and the number of topics covered, it's hard to pin down an exact analysis of it, since so much is going on. I agree this is a historically important documentary, with many powerful scenes, both during interviews and just during scenes when the camera is wordlessly panning over what remains of the camps today. Although it would be too easy and simplistic to just automatically give this a 5-star review and say it's the best most authorative film on the Shoah ever made. This by no means covers nearly everything that happened during the Shoah, even in its massive length of nine and a half hours. About the last hour is devoted to just the Warsaw Ghetto and the uprising, but apart from that the ghettoes aren't covered. What this documentary does cover are five of the six Vernichtungslageren (annihiliation camps) in Poland--Treblinka, Sobibór, Belzec, Chelmno, and Oswiecim (Auschwitz), and what happened to the people on their way there in the death wagons. There are interviews with people on all sides--survivors (including the only two survivors of Chelmno, Simon Srebnik and Michael Podchlebnik), ghetto guards and bureaucrats, people who ran the camps (particularly Franz Suchomel of Treblinka), villagers who watched the death wagons coming and going (their reactions to these peoples' fate and what they claim to have done for them seems mixed), the survivors themselves, and the Polish diplomat Jan Karski, who had begged the world to stop the genocide he knew very well was going on. Among the survivors interviewed was Rudolf Vrba, one of my heroes, who escaped Oswiecim on 7 April 1944 along with his friend Alfred Wetzler to try to warn the world about what was being planned for Hungarian Jewry. Another big plus supporting this documentary is that it was made in 1985, when there were more survivors around, and most of them were younger than they are today. And though some people might be turned off by how much of the film is in subtitles, I enjoyed hearing all of that German, French, Italian, Polish, and Hebrew, and felt my own listening comprehension of German vastly improving as the film wore on, at times barely needing the subtitles.
All of that said, this film at times feels like it overshot the mark, since it covers so much ground even within that specific topic of the extermination camps in Poland, and yet doesn't really seem to be very structured. Many times this documentary has a very nonlinear feel and composition, which at one level works since when dealing with something like the Shoah, all concepts of time and place really did become unimportant and nonlinear, but even so, it can also have the feeling of just jumping back and forth between interviews and footage. For example, we return to several interviews a number of times after having had long stretches in between covering other things. There were also some segments that could have been cut and didn't really belong there, like the dancing couple in the German nightclub. For the entire documentary, information is merely being presented; no conclusions are drawn, no analyses made, no archival footage used. Some people might feel this is just as appropriate a technique as having such a nonlinear structure, but after finding out what Ron Rosenbaum has to say about Monsieur Lanzmann in the book 'Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil,' one is led to question why he used some of these techniques and why he doesn't feel there should be any analysis of the Shoah, no attempt to explain why these awful things happened or account for the great evil that took place, as though accounting for it somehow justifies it.
Certainly this is an important film everyone should see at least once, but some of the effect is lessened by the lack of archival footage, the nonlinear structure and layout, and the refusal to draw any conclusions, make any analyses, provide any historical background for why these events were set in motion in the first place. It's an important film about the Shoah, but by no means the most important one or the most authoritative one ever made. The price also seems a little hefty; is it because of this film's huge reputation that it costs much more than most other four-disc sets?
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