Faced with certain abysses of history, cinema, with its ontological vocation for representation, finds itself at an epistemological crossroads: to show or to evoke? To document the archive or to record the echo? Most choose the first path, the safe, codified one of the historical image, of repertory footage, of the photograph that serves as a fetish of memory. Claude Lanzmann, with "Shoah", doesn't merely choose the second path: he carves it out with his bare hands over eleven years, building a cinematic counter-monument that rejects every single convention of the historical documentary to become something else. An experience. A nine-and-a-half-hour psychoanalytic session for Western civilization. A funeral oration without a corpse.

The radical gesture—almost a sacrilege for the historian but an epiphany for the cinephile—is the absolute, programmatic, theological absence of archival images. Lanzmann understands that the unspeakable horror cannot be illustrated by the same grainy footage that, through sheer repetition, risks desensitization, turning tragedy into iconography. His wager is dizzying: to film nothingness in order to recount annihilation. To film the present in order to make the past erupt. The green, silent meadows of Treblinka, the inert ruins of Birkenau, the quiet Polish villages are not backdrops, but protagonists. They are the crime scene after time has washed away the blood, but not the memory. In this, Lanzmann is closer to a metaphysical landscape painter like De Chirico than to a documentarian. His shots are De Chirico’s Italian piazzas, emptied of life but pregnant with a terrible expectation, of an event that has already happened and continues to happen in its absence.

The image, then, is the void, and the soundtrack is the plenitude. "Shoah" is an eminently oral film, a symphony of testimonies that fills the silence of the locations. But Lanzmann is no passive confessor. He is a Socratic midwife, an inquisitor, at times even a tormentor of memory. His interviews are never consoling; they are a surgical operation without anesthesia. He pushes his witnesses—survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders—to the breaking point, to the place where words fail and only pure trauma remains. The famous, harrowing sequence with Abraham Bomba, the barber of Treblinka, is the emblem of this method. While he mimes cutting hair in a salon in Israel, Lanzmann presses him to describe the arrival of the naked women in the fake gas chamber disguised as a shower. Bomba stops, begs him not to continue. "We have to do it. You know it," Lanzmann retorts off-camera. It is a moment of unprecedented, yet necessary, cinematic cruelty. This is cinema taking on its highest calling: not to entertain, not to inform, but to compel testimony, to force our gaze upon that which we would rather shut our eyes to.

This obstinacy in unearthing the repressed aligns Lanzmann's method with that of a Dostoevsky, who forced his characters to confess their darkest truths not to judge them, but to reveal the abyss of the human soul. The interview with Franz Suchomel, an ex-SS officer from Treblinka filmed with a hidden camera, is no summary trial. It is a chilling lesson in the anatomy of the banality of evil. Suchomel describes the routine of extermination with the precision of a technician, even humming the little song the prisoners were forced to sing. There is no remorse, only the memory of a job well done. In that off-key song, in that meticulous logistical description, lies a horror more profound than any image of violence. It is the horror of normalization, of the bureaucracy of death.

The film's runtime, often criticized as excessive, is instead a fundamental structural element. Nine and a half hours are not meant to accumulate information, but to disintegrate the viewer's defenses. One does not "watch" "Shoah"; one passes through it. It is an experience of physical and psychological endurance. Its dilated temporality, recalling the radicalism of Andy Warhol's Empire or the grueling slowness of Lav Diaz's films, is not an auteurist affectation. It is the cinematic mimesis of the industrial process of the Final Solution: slow, repetitive, inexorable, bureaucratic. The long train journeys, the rhythmic clatter of the wheels on the tracks becoming the metronome of death, the descriptions that return again and again like a liturgical refrain—all contribute to creating a hypnosis, a waking state in which historical time collapses and the past becomes an intolerable present. There is no catharsis, no resolution. At the end, one is simply exhausted, emptied, like the places the film depicts.

If Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, made thirty years earlier, was a poetic and mournful essay that used a dialectical montage of present-day color and past black-and-white, "Shoah" is its antithesis. It is a film that exists entirely in a full-color present—a sick, haunted present. It is a work that holds more of a dialogue with the Land Art of Robert Smithson, who brought pieces of desolate landscapes into the gallery with his "non-sites" to speak of entropy and memory, than with traditional documentary cinema. Lanzmann performs the reverse operation: he brings his camera to these "non-sites" of history, transforming the screen into a liminal space where the landscape becomes a document and the spoken word becomes a monument.

The film's release in 1985 was a watershed moment. In an era still dominated by more conventional representation, and before Schindler's List would attempt the path of narrative reconstruction, "Shoah" imposed a new ethics of spectatorship. It demonstrated that to confront the unrepresentable, one did not need to recreate it, but to encircle it, to trace its outlines through the scars it left on the world and on its people. It is a film that rejects easy emotion in favor of difficult comprehension. It does not ask the viewer to weep, but to listen. To look at a meadow and hear the screams. To watch an old man, Simon Srebnik, one of only two survivors of Chełmno, singing on a boat in the Ner River, and to perceive the full weight of a history that cannot be told, but only handed down as an echo, a broken song that resonates in an eternal, terrible present. "Shoah" is not a film about the Holocaust. It is a fragment of the Holocaust itself, transmuted into time, space, and sound. A world-making work that does not simply enter the cinematic canon, but rewrites it, leaving a furrow from which it is impossible to turn back.