Family Frames: Filming Gertrude Schneider for 'Shoah'

Resumo

During the making of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann amassed 230 hours of filmed footage, an archive purchased by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1996 and preserved over the course of twenty years. This article examines the unused testimonies of three women survivors, who were filmed for Shoah in the 1970s. In the finished film, they are largely missing from Lanzmann’s Holocaust narrative. Yet, he interviewed almost a dozen women survivors and accumulated twenty hours of unused footage with them. In this article, I focus on the testimony filmed in New York in 1978 with the scholar-survivor Gertrude Schneider, her mother Charlotte Hirschorn, and her sister Rita Wasserman. Shifting attention from the finished film to the outtakes sheds light on the choices made in the editing room. In so doing, we can theorize the exclusion of women survivors and analyze the construction of testimonial performances during the making of Shoah.