An Archive of the Catastrophe

<p><b>Comprehensive analysis of 220 hours of outtakes that impels us to reexamine our assumptions about a crucial Holocaust documentary.</b></p><p><b>Honorable Mention 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies</b></p><p>Claude Lanzmann's 1985 magnum opus <i>Shoah</i> is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust-and in film history. Over the course of twelve years Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors witnesses and perpetrators which he condensed into a 9½-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 <i>An Archive of the Catastrophe</i> 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 <i>Shoah</i> and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film including questions of resistance rescue refugees and above all gender-Lanzmann's twenty hours of 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 this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film.</p><p>To view the book trailer on YouTube please go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBjUWyAn55g</p>