Review of Shoah

How does one review a movie such as this? Well, I'm going to try. It has been said that nobody can fully understand how horrible the Holocaust was, because we aren't experiencing it firsthand. In my personal opinion, Shoah is the closest we will ever get at understanding the horror of it. This film doesn't show any archival footage of the Holocaust or dramatizations of it, instead we just have interviews of people who witnessed it. We watch as these people try to tell their stories and as they break down and start crying. Several times, Lanzmann zoomed the camera so that we could just be immersed in the emotions of the survivors. While Schindler's List was a fantastic movie, it's still a dramiziation and consisted of actors. This movie does not. It's real life survivors, witnesses and former Nazis explaining what they saw or went through in graphic detail. Not a pleasant film to watch, but again it's not supposed to be. This is a wonderous film and I would consider it the landmark of the century in terms of filmmaking. The only problem I have with the movie is that it's too powerful, so trying to watch the movie all at once would be overwhelming. This is an absolute groundbreaking masterpiece that anybody, especially history buffs, should watch.

10/10