Note: This episode’s discussion and the film we are discussing, explicitly recounts the brutal methods, unimaginable suffering, and lingering trauma of the Holocaust.  Sensitive listeners may want to skip this one and join us next week.

The hosts of Random Acts of Cinema shy away neither from films of exceptional length nor films with difficult subject matter.  But the double impact of both in Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary Shoah would seem to really put our constitutions to the test.  But what we found was a confident and meticulously paced film, whose use of interview-based testimonies of survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, uncompromising interview tactics, and bleak photography of derelict death camp sites at Chelmno, Treblinka, and Auschwitz made for an engrossing, uniquely informative exploration of the decidedly devastating topic.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Steven Soderbergh’s King of the Hill (1993).