Famed French Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann Has Died

July 5, 2018. Paris, France. Noted writer and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has died at the age 92. Lanzmann was the son of Eastern European Jewish emigres and, as a teenager, joined the French Resistance forces during World War II. He became an impassioned journalistic investigator of The Holocaust and his efforts turned into the ground-breaking 10-hour documentary Shoah or Holocaust that for most audiences became the definitive statement on this piece of 20th century history. This 1985 film was largely an oral history of the deliberate extermination of millions of Jews and other minorities housed in Nazi concentration camps. For more than a decade, Claude Lanzmann put faces and voices on this story as he interviewed numerous Holocaust survivors, local bystanders, and  even some of the Nazi officers who were involved with the camps, three of which formed the backdrop for much of the filming. Additional films like The Last of the Unjust and The Four Sisters, the latter released the day before his death, continued Lanzmann’s career-long focus on The Holocaust. Although he was married three times, Claude Lanzmann’ s most famous relationship was during the 1950s with legendary French existential philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir. He is survived by his widow, Dr. Dominique Lanzmann-Petithory and a daughter Angelique.