Biography

In 2013 Claude Lanzmann received the Honorary Golden Bear for 'Lifetime Achievement' at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival. It was the first time that a documentary filmmaker received this honor from the Berlinale.

Since 2013 Claude Lanzmann is a member of the 'Documentary Branch' of the 'Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' (AMPAS).

Older brother of Jacques Lanzmann and Evelyne Rey.

Since 1986 Claude Lanzmann is the director of "Les Temps modernes", an intellectual magazine founded in 1945 by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Napalm (2017) is his first and only documentary about North Korea. Lanzmann first visited the reclusive state in 1958 and returned four times after that.

The first and only time Shoah (1985) was screened at a cinema in Madrid, Castilian fascists in brown shirts and swastika armbands set up booths by the theatre doors and passed out the worst revisionist literature to viewers beneath the unruffled gaze of the police, who refused to intervene: they hadn't been ordered to. Such was freedom in the fledgling Spanish democracy! The next day, when the second part was screening, a bomb scare put an end to its run: this time, the police intervened zealously to evacuate the room. Later, Spanish national television broadcast "Shoah" at the outrageous hour of 2 a.m., tantamount to censorship. I intervened with the highest cultural authorities in an attempt to secure another broadcast, but in vain. I was told that television was free to choose its shows and schedule. [preface to "Shoah, une pédagogie de la mémoire" by Carles Torner, Éditions de l'Atelier, Paris 2001]

[on the Shoah aka Holocaust] The human brain is not prepared to understand this - even on the steps of the gas chamber. [2011]

...there's not a single corpse in Shoah (1985). The people who arrived at Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor were killed within two or three hours and their corpses burned. The proof is not the corpses; the proof is the absence of corpses. There were special details who gathered the dust and threw it into the wind or into the rivers. Nothing of them remained. [2011]

[on the reception of Shoah (1985)] The film was a triumph everywhere. In all the newspapers. Amos Oz wrote five articles about the film. It was unanimous. I don't know how many interviews they made. They made pictures, they made profiles of me. They understood perfectly that there was 'before Shoah' and 'after Shoah'. [2015]

[on historian Raul Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews", first published in 1961] No other book will ever be, by my hand, annotated to such a degree. A beacon of a book, a breakwater of a book, a ship of history anchored in time and in a sense beyond time, undying, unforgettable, to which nothing in the course of ordinary historical production can be compared. [1993]