Archive of the Catastrophe

"Claude Lanzmann's 1985 magnum opus Shoah is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust--and in film history. Over twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a nine-and-a-half-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe, Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend new insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and above all gender--interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, the unused footage of Shoah challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film"--