Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Holocaust. Survivors, perpetrators and bystanders talk. The sites are shown as they are now. There is no archive footage of the camps in operation.

This is the other side of Night and Fog. Resnais used the images so the atrocity could never be downplayed. Lanzmann refuses them. He makes people speak, and he stays with the trains, the empty clearings, the faces that remember. The effect is just as shocking, and somehow harder to look away from.

The interviews are extraordinary. A barber who cut hair in the gas chambers. A train driver. Polish villagers who watched the transports. Lanzmann does not let anyone off. The length is the point. You cannot dip in and out. You have to sit with it.

It is beautifully made in the same way Night and Fog is.

Essential viewing.

5 out of 5 stars