Camionnette (minibus used for hidden camera interviews)

Identifier
irn1004815
Language of Description
English
Alt. Identifiers
  • 1996.166
  • RG-60.5058
Dates
1 Jan 1985 - 31 Dec 1985
Level of Description
Item
Languages
  • Silent
  • French
Source
EHRI Partner

Creator(s)

Biographical History

Claude Lanzmann was born in Paris to a Jewish family that immigrated to France from Eastern Europe. He attended the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. His family went into hiding during World War II. He joined the French resistance at the age of 18 and fought in the Auvergne. Lanzmann opposed the French war in Algeria and signed a 1960 antiwar petition. From 1952 to 1959 he lived with Simone de Beauvoir. In 1963 he married French actress Judith Magre. Later, he married Angelika Schrobsdorff, a German-Jewish writer, and then Dominique Petithory in 1995. He is the father of Angélique Lanzmann, born in 1950, and Félix Lanzmann (1993-2017). Lanzmann's most renowned work, Shoah, is widely regarded as the seminal film on the subject of the Holocaust. He began interviewing survivors, historians, witnesses, and perpetrators in 1973 and finished editing the film in 1985. In 2009, Lanzmann published his memoirs under the title "Le lièvre de Patagonie" (The Patagonian Hare). He was chief editor of the journal "Les Temps Modernes," which was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, until his death on July 5, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/claude-lanzmann-changed-the-history-of-filmmaking-with-shoah

Scope and Content

Minibus with equipment for hidden camera interviews, staged in the suburbs of Paris at Saint Cloud, near the LTC Studio where the final film's editing was done, in May 1983. This could have been staged in France rather late in the film's production to illustrate a sequence about the hidden camera interviews for the final film (note the closeups of the minibus and the "home" of a perpetrator -- the zoom into a specific window, for instance). FILM ID 3452 -- Ext. Camionnette / Camera Rolls 1-4-6, 14-26 Several sequences showing exteriors of the red-striped Volkswagen minibus with the equipment for transmitting Lanzmann's hidden camera interviews. The minibus arrives at a residential destination and parks. The driver exits the vehicle and enters the back using a sliding side door. The camera zooms in on several residences, homes, and apartments. 01:04:48 Collision with fast-moving lorry. FILM ID 3665 -- Camion en planque Several takes of the minibus. This reel was probably filmed in Germany to correspond to the interview with Stier, RG-60.5064

Note(s)

  • No transcript. Likely filmed in May 1983 according to information on quarter-inch audio carton. It is possible that the scenes were staged in France perhaps because they had temporarily lost or misplaced such footage.

  • Claude Lanzmann spent twelve years locating survivors, perpetrators, and eyewitnesses for his nine and a half hour film Shoah released in 1985. Without archival footage, Shoah weaves together extraordinary testimonies to render the step-by-step machinery of the destruction of European Jewry. Critics have called it "a masterpiece" and a "monument against forgetting." The Claude Lanzmann SHOAH Collection consists of roughly 185 hours of interview outtakes and 35 hours of location filming.

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Genre

This description is derived directly from structured data provided to EHRI by a partner institution. This collection holding institution considers this description as an accurate reflection of the archival holdings to which it refers at the moment of data transfer.