Shoah: Four Sisters
Director: Claude Lanzmann
Screenplay: Claude Lanzmann
Minutes: 273
Year: 2018
Score: 7.31
Release: Cohen Media Group
Five years and three-hundred posts ago my essay on Claude Lanzmann’s seminal holocaust documentary Shoah went live. It is a film that will change your life forever, and this follow-up, Shoah: Four Sisters, is a collection of four interviews recorded around the same time but not used in the original.
From CohenMedia.net:
Starting in 1999, Claude Lanzmann made several films that could be considered satellites of SHOAH, comprised of interviews conducted in the 1970s that didn’t make it into the final, monumental work. In the last years of the late director’s life, he decided to devote a film to four women from four different areas of Eastern Europe with four different destinies, each finding herself improbably alive after war’s end: Ruth Elias from Ostravia, Czechoslovakia; Paula Biren from Lodz, Poland; Ada Lichtman from further south in Krakow; and Hannah Marton from Cluj, or Kolozsvár, in Transylvania. Survivors of unimaginable Nazi horrors during the Holocaust, they tell their individual stories and become crucial witnesses to the barbarism they experienced. Each possesses a vivid intelligence and a commitment to candor that make their accounts of what they suffered through both searing and unforgettable. Four Sisters now arrives on the screen to remind audiences of the immense courage it took for these witnesses to return to their past as they share their deeply moving personal tragedies. The frankness of their words, their intensely scrutinized faces, and their bravery as they revisit unimaginable experiences will make them lasting presences in the moral universe of younger generations. “What they have in common,” wrote Lanzmann, “apart from the specific horrors each one of them was subjected to, is their intelligence, an incisive, sharp and carnal intelligence that rejects all pretense and false reasons-in a word-idealism.” Lanzmann’s films remarkably stay within the immediate present tense, where the absolute horror of the Shoah is always happening.
I would like to think that Lanzmann decided to release this film as a response to the growing movements of fascism around the world. Whether or not this is the case, or it is just a continuation of a long trickle of interview content compiled during he initial gathering, I am glad it was release now. Three of the stories told feel equally as devastating as those in the original film with the forth being a conversation on a morally corrupt subject.
It should be very difficult to imagine how these horrible stories were not horrible enough for the original film. I suppose that is the reflection of the Holocaust, all stories are terrible and while some may be worse than others, everyone suffered and deserves to be heard as loudly as the next one.
The story of the affluent woman from Cluj, Hannah Marton, may have been the most interesting story. While the other three were of the horrors of concentration camps, Ms. Morton talked about her, and more specifically her husband’s, more affluent life. How they were able to stay a few steps ahead of the Nazis in their escape and her husbands work negotiating the survival of many of their fellow citizens at the unfortunate cost of several hundreds of thousands of others. It is an unfortunate tale of pseudo victory and the social stigma associated with it. Ms. Marton is a survivor of the Holocaust, the same as the rest, and yet her story rings, at times, despicable.
Much like it’s namesake Shoah, Shoah: Four Sisters is an incredible document of the Holocaust, and an essential addition to the existing collections of stories that, with any help, can keep us from repeating those atrocities.
The technical aspects of the disc appear to be an accurate representation of the source material with its 16mm film grain present. While I would sooner recommend the Criterion edition of Shoah, the Four Sisters is an essential companion piece.
Special Features:
- Conversation with Henri-Bernard Levy
- Shoah: Four Sister Theatrical Trailer
Director: 5 – Cinematography: 8 – Edit: 4 – Parity: 8 – Main performance: 10 – Else performance: NA – Score: 5 – Sound: 5 – Story: 10 – Script: 10 – Effects: NA – Design: 5 – Costumes: 5 – Keeps interest: 10 – Lasting: 10