Lenzman shoah

Hailed as a masterpiece by many critics, Shoah was described in the New York Times as
"an epic film about the greatest evil of modern times."[8] According to Richard
Brody, François Mitterrandattended the first screening in Paris in April 1985 when he was
President of France, Václav Havel watched it in prison, and Mikhail Gorbachev arranged
public screenings in the Soviet Union in 1989.[30]
In 1985 critic Roger Ebert described it as "an extraordinary film" and "one of the noblest
films ever made".[33] He wrote: "It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not
political. It is an act of witness."[34] Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes shows
a 100% score, based on 33 reviews, with an average rating of 9.2/10. The website's critical
consensus states: "Expansive in its beauty as well as its mind-numbing horror, Shoah is a
towering — and utterly singular — achievement in cinema."[35] Metacritic reports a 99 out of
100 rating, based on four critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[36] As of May 2018 it is the
site's 20th highest-rated film, including re-releases.[37]
Time Out and The Guardian listed Shoah as the best documentary of all time in 2016 and
2013 respectively.[38] In a 2014 British Film Institute (BFI) Sight and Sound poll, film critics
voted it second of the best documentary films of all time.[39] In 2012 it ranked 29th and 48th
respectively in the BFI's critics' and directors' polls of the greatest films of all time.[40]
The film was criticized in Poland. Mieczyslaw Biskupski wrote that Lanzmann's "purpose in
making the film was revealed by his comments that he 'fears' Poland and that the death
camps could not have been constructed in France because the 'French peasantry would
not have tolerated them'".[41] Government-run newspapers and state television criticized the
film, as did numerous commentators; Jerzy Turowicz, editor of the Catholic
weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, called it partial and tendentious.[42] The Socio-Cultural
Association of Jews in Poland (Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Żydów w Polsce) called
it a provocation and delivered a protest letter to the French embassy in Warsaw.[43] Foreign
Minister Władysław Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor and an honorary citizen of Israel,
criticized Lanzmann for ignoring the thousands of Polish rescuers of Jews, focusing instead
on impoverished rural Poles, selected to conform with his preconceived notions.
Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, a Polish writer (with Jewish roots) and dissident, was puzzled
by Lanzmann's omission of anybody in Poland with advanced knowledge of the
Holocaust.[44] In his book Dziennik pisany nocą, Herling-Grudziński wrote that the thematic
construction of Shoah allowed Lanzmann to exercise a reduction method so extreme that
the plight of the non-Jewish Poles must remain a mystery to the viewer. Grudziński asked
a rhetorical question in his book: "Did the Poles live in peace, quietly plowing farmers' fields
with their backs turned on the long fuming chimneys of death-camp crematoria? Or, were
they exterminated along with the Jews as subhuman?" According to Grudziński, Lanzmann
leaves this question unanswered, but the historical evidence shows that Poles also
suffered widespread massacres at the hands of the Nazis.[44]
The American film critic Pauline Kael, whose parents were Jewish immigrants to the US
from Poland,[45] called the film "a form of self-punishment, describing it in The New Yorker in
1985 as "logy and exhausting right from the start ..." "Lanzmann did all the questioning
himself," she wrote, "while putting pressure on people in a discursive manner, which gave
the film a deadening weight."[46]Writing in The New Yorker in 2010, Richard
Brody suggested that Kael's "misunderstandings of Shoah are so grotesque as to seem
willful."[47]