Shoah is a bad film.
That it fumbles a narrative of such devastating import is especially embarrassing, but my central complaint about the film concerns poor form: specifically, Lanzmann’s overbearing and repeated insistence on forcing the viewer through the whole circus of translation. Every single time a question is asked, the correspondence plays out in full: Lanzmann > translator > interviewee > translator. It is this, rather than any especial quantity of these precious historical voices, that makes for such a massive clock-buster…
