Shoah director Claude Lanzmann dies aged 92

Claude Lanzmann, the French film-maker and journalist who was best known for the exhaustive Holocaust documentary Shoah, has died aged 92. Lanzmann’s family confirmed his death to Le Monde, though its cause has not been revealed.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants to France, Lanzmann was born in Paris in 1925, and as a teenager fought in the resistance before studying philosophy at the Sorbonne after the war. After a period teaching in West Germany in the late 40s, he returned to France and, after meeting Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, he was invited to join the board of Les Temps Modernes, the influential journal they had founded in 1945. He embarked on a passionate relationship with de Beauvoir, 18 years his senior, and they lived together from 1952 to 1959. In 1986, Lanzmann became chief editor of Les Temps Modernes on de Beauvoir’s death and remained in the post for the rest of his life.

As a journalist, Lanzmann fully engaged with the political ferment of the 1950s and 60s, writing lengthy and significant articles about Israel, North Korea and Tibet, and was one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121, denouncing French government actions in Algeria.

Lanzmann’s film-making grew out of his journalistic and intellectual preoccupations. His first documentary Pourquoi Israel? (Why Israel?) began as a series of interviews he conducted for a French TV show, and was his own attempt to answer the anti-colonial broadsides of his fellow leftwing intellectuals and grapple with what he called the “complex Israeli reality”. It was released in 1973 as the country reached its 25th anniversary.

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