Claude Lanzmann

We are living through a mini-boom in documentaries about North Korea. Film-makers are getting into Pyongyang to shoot – clandestinely, semi-clandestinely and on various pretexts – those vast statues and eerie cityscapes. Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno suggested the North Koreans’ defensive mindset had something to do with living in the shadow of a volcano, Mount Paektu. Norwegian director Morten Traavik told the extraordinary story of how obscure Slovenian art-rockers Laibach became the first Western band to play North Korea. Alvaro Longorio’s The Propaganda Game argued that North Korea is a zombie state, kept alive by the duplicitous interests of great powers, and Ross Adam and Robert Cannon’s The Lovers and the Despot is about the staggering true story of how in late 70s the movie-mad North Korean leader Kim Jong-il actually kidnapped a South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his wife Choi Eun-hee, and forced them to work in his industry.Read More »

In 1979, while making his epochal Holocaust film, “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann filmed this interview with Maurice Rossel, a Red Cross doctor from Switzerland who, having visited Auschwitz and Theresienstadt in 1944, gave the latter a highly favorable report. Lanzmann questions Rossel insistently about the deceptions that the Germans forced the Jewish inmates of Theresienstadt to perpetrate for Rossel’s benefit—which fooled the doctor completely. Lanzmann culminates his interview by reading a speech with which the Jewish “mayor” of the concentration camp had welcomed Rossel, which, though vague enough to pass unnoticed by the German captors, resounds unambiguously as a thinly veiled cry for help—and an exhortation to Rossel to not be deceived by appearances. Rossel is easy to despise and easier to mock, but the cold light of his detachment serves as a reminder of the tyrannical deceits that, even now, conceal atrocities. Released in 1997.Read More »