For a concentrated overview of Nazi horror, Resnais' poetic thirty-minute Night and Fog remains definitive, but for the hardy, Shoah relentlessly uncovers facets that viewers will never forget, posing questions about just what it means to be a human being in this crazy universe.
Claude Lanzmann's 1985 Shoah is so indebted to this film that it never could have been conceived, much less made, without Resnais' example, and Schindler's List is a cartoon alongside it.
In practice, it competes only with Alain Resnais's nightmarish 1955 short Night and Fog to be the most devastating and comprehensive document about the Holocaust yet produced.
If the first option had been realized so perfectly in Alain Resnais’ brief but powerful 1955 film, Night and Fog, and the second option too vulgar for everyone but the Americans, what were filmmakers who wanted to explore the millions of stories of the Holocaust to do? Claude Lanzmann, a French filmmaker and contemporary of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, spent eleven years exploring a third option.