EXCLUSIVE: Oscar-nominated filmmaker Adam Benzine is releasing a director’s cut of his award-winning documentary on Claude Lanzmann, the protean French author, philosopher and filmmaker who made the Holocaust epic Shoah.
Benzine’s new version of the film, which expands his short to feature length, premieres on VOD platforms on Sunday under the title The Death and Love of Claude Lanzmann (La mort et l’amour de Claude Lanzmann). It arrives 10 years after the release of the original film, titled Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, which earned an Academy Award nomination.
Watch a clip below from the director’s cut of The Death and Love of Claude Lanzmann.
Claude Lanzmann
HBO
“In the decade since we first launched our film, Claude Lanzmann’s stature and legacy as a filmmaker and historian has only grown,” Benzine said in a statement. “One thing we’ve heard frequently over the years is that, at only 40 minutes in length, people wished the film were longer. This new version addresses that, taking a deeper dive into the tumultuous journey that led to the creation of Shoah, while also restoring the film’s original planned title.”
Benzine added, “It’s such an honor to release this new version to mark the centennial anniversary of Mr. Lanzmann’s birth, in parallel with the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, as well as the 40th anniversary of Shoah’s 1985 release. The film’s themes are more relevant than ever.”
For the original version of the film, Benzine interviewed Lanzmann at length about the making of Shoah, discussing “the secret undercover filming of former Nazis; the long process of convincing traumatized Holocaust survivors to talk on screen and subsequent emotional interviews; his battles over the project’s length and cost; and the draining challenge of chronicling one of the greatest atrocities the world has ever known; as well as the events that nearly cost him his life.”
Claude Lanzmann nears the Treblinka death camp while making ‘Shoah’
USHMM et YAD VASHEM – Collection SHOAH de Claude Lanzmann
After its world premiere at Hot Docs in 2015, Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah triggered a bidding war in which HBO prevailed. The film won awards around the world, including Best Documentary Short at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece and was nominated for four Canadian Screen Awards, the IDA Award for Best Short Documentary, and the Cinema Eye Honors.
Filmmaker Adam Benzine
Alison Boulier
I interviewed Benzine in 2015 after he earned his Oscar nomination for the documentary. He told me then about spending time with Lanzmann, a man of great intellect with a reputation (as the film pointed out) for a touch of megalomania.
“It was perhaps the interview of my life,” Benzine, a journalist and filmmaker, told me. “He was exactly as I’d hoped he’d be — lucid, poetic, interesting, eloquent, thoughtful and not nearly as difficult as he can be. And I don’t know if that’s because we’d built a rapport or I’d caught him on a good week. I’d like to think it was that we built a rapport and that he could see I’d done a lot of research, and I knew his work inside and out.”
Benzine added, regarding Lanzmann and Shoah, “The Holocaust was not an abstract concept to him. He was a Jew in France during the Second World War. [As a member of the French Resistance] if he had been captured, he would have been killed. He would have been put on a train and deported or he would have been killed. That’s quite significant when you see him [in Shoah] sitting opposite a former Nazi, a former SS officer, pretending to be ‘pal-y’ with them, saying ‘Oh, no, I’m not being judge-y, I’m just writing a paper.’”
In addition to Lanzmann’s testimony, the original and expanded versions of Benzine’s documentary feature never-before-seen outtake material shot by Lanzmann and his team in the 1970s. The outtakes have been digitally restored to full HD for the director’s cut, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The expanded version of Benzine’s film will be available at lanzmannfilm.com as well as on VOD platforms.
The Death and Love of Claude Lanzmann (La mort et l’amour de Claude Lanzmann) is written, produced and directed by Adam Benzine, co-produced by Kimberley Warner, and executive produced by Nick Fraser (Man on Wire). It features an original score composed by Joel Goodman (JFK, Everything is Copy, The Curve), and is edited by Tiffany Beaudin (Prosecuting Evil, The Silent Planet). The director of photography is Alexander Ordanis (Endless Cookie, Slash/Back). International sales are handled by Cinephil and educational sales are handled by Film Platform.
Lanzmann died in 2018 at the age of 92. In the exclusive clip below from The Death and Love of Claude Lanzmann, he speaks about his relationship with the great French writer Simone de Beauvoir, his romantic partner from 1952-1959.