This is the third in my 2025 bi-monthly series Audient Zeitgeist, in which I'm watching previously unseen movies that have an ongoing role in our zeitgeist.
With my 7,000th movie on the horizon -- that's 7,000 distinct titles, not 7,000 total viewings -- I had been scouting movies with the number 7,000 in their title, but I wasn't liking the choices too much.
Red Line 7000? 7000 Miles? Paris 7000? Tallahassee 7000?
I hadn't heard of any of them, and this was starting to feel like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T all over again. (Which was not a good way to celebrate the milestone of 5,000 films watched. Especially not that particular milestone.)
So a couple months ago I started to take a different tack, and I came up with a title that would also work with my Audient Zeitgeist series.
Which is how I came to watch the longest movie I've ever seen on the longest day of the year, though of course June 21st is actually the shortest day of the year in the southern hemisphere, making the task all the more challenging.
(It's the same number of hours, of course. And less daylight is probably more rather than less conducive to watching a movie all day.)
Did I say all day? I meant it.
The reasons Claude Lanzmann's 1985 documentary Shoah makes for a good 7,000th movie, and why 2025 is a particularly good time to watch it:
1) The movie is listed on IMDB as 9 hours and 26 minutes long. I say "listed," because the four-disc DVD set I picked up off Amazon contained what appeared to be "only" 9 hours and 4 minutes of movie. At that point, what's another 22 minutes? But I'm sure I did not need it.
2) When this movie came out in 1985, it had been 40 years since the end of World War II, a period of time the film remembers as it interviews survivors and witnesses of the Third Reich's attempt to exterminate the Jewish people through their concentration camps in Poland. It has now been 40 years since the movie came out, and 80 years since the end of World War II. So that makes for an interesting perspective, both on how far we had come (or not come) by then, and how far we have come (or not come) now.
The reasons Shoah is a good Audient Zeitgeist movie:
1) The word "zeitgeist" is German.
2) Number two takes a little more explanation and introduces you to my personal history with the movie, such as it is.
I first became aware of Shoah sometime in the late 1980s, and if memory serves me correctly, I discovered it while poring over one of Roger Ebert's books of great movies. Actually I think it was a book of his capsule reviews, but I'm not finding the exact thing listed in his bibliography. In any case, it was some Ebert-related book, and I must have been going through it with a fine-toothed comb in order to learn that this movie called Shoah was 9 hours and 26 minutes long (or maybe just 9:04).
I immediately told my friends about this. Or they discovered it and they told me. This was nearly 40 years ago so forgive me if my memory is hazy.
In any case, we were intensely fascinated by a movie that utterly exploded our notion of the viable length for a feature film. I mean, how would you even watch a nine-hour movie? Would there be bathroom breaks?
Shoah became a go-to example I would use in scenarios where a long movie was required. Today I am more likely to talk about Lord of the Rings: Return of the King -- like, "It's only 1 a.m., it's not too late to start watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" -- but back at that time, Shoah would have been my example. Maybe over the years, I prefer my jokes to be a little less exaggerated.
Because solemn subject matter aside, which we will discuss in detail later in this piece, there had to be something exaggerated, something avant garde, something intentionally button-pushing about a movie that so blithely disregarded existing cinematic conventions for length?
I guess I don't know the extent to which Shoah holds this role for people in the population at large, which is what makes me unsure if this truly qualifies as a zeitgeist movie. Maybe for other people, Bela Tarr's 7 hour and 19 minute Satantango is their Shoah. But my friends and I seemed to talk about Shoah a lot, and therefore, I'm happy enough to extrapolate this fascination to other people as well.
I always distantly imagined I might see Shoah, but I never knew what circumstances those would be. A little internet research tells me that the first people to see Shoah saw it in October of 1985, when it debuted at New York's Cinema Studio, but that most people saw it two years later across four nights on PBS.
I knew I didn't want to watch it across four nights. That felt like cheating.
If they made Shoah today, it would not be considered a single feature, but a limited documentary series, like O.J.: Made in America. What fascinates me so much about it is that it existed outside of such streaming era conventions, making it an absolute anomaly for its time, and giving it a different feeling than the long-form documentaries we would get today.
Getting my hands on it at all was the first problem I had to tackle.
I couldn't find it streaming anywhere, for possibly obvious reasons, though they might slice it up if they didn't want to load one giant file lasting over nine hours. But I did find it available on DVD through Amazon.
If I wanted to get it in Australia, it would cost me something like $150, and that was not an amount I was willing to spend, even for a landmark 7,000th movie. In the U.S., though, there was a copy available for only $30. I would solve the DVD region incompatibility issue with the fact that I still have a computer set to the correct DVD region and it still works, for just such occasions. I just needed to send it to my friend Don in Chicago, who would send it to me and I would pay him back for the shipping. Turns out, he shipped it from work so I didn't need to pay him back at all.
When I received the DVD, more than a month ago, the writing on the DVD case was in German. This momentarily made me wonder if a) it was actual Region 1, which is how I have my old laptop set, or b) if the option to watch with English subtitles would even be available. And though I had to navigate a DVD title menu in German, indeed the "Sprach" menu allowed me to pick English for the subtitles, and indeed I was off and rolling.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I have to tell you how I got to picking this past Saturday.
When I made the decision to do this as part of Audient Zeitgeist, which had a bi-monthly post due in June, it was mid-May and I still had something like 35 movies to watch before 7,000. That would be faster than my usual pace at this time of year, but I knew that if I put my mind to it and I didn't schedule any rewatches, I could time it out to hit 7,000 by the last weekend in June.
As it turns out, I really put my mind to it, and also spent a weekend being sick, so I got there with time to spare, and on track to watch it even a weekend earlier than that final weekend. In fact, I had to slow down my usual pace this week, scheduling rewatches for Tuesday and Friday nights and not watching anything on Wednesday, so that 28 Years Later on Thursday night would be #6,999, and I'd be ready to start Shoah on Saturday morning.
Because one thing I was sure of: It would be cheating if I did not watch this all within the same day. Yes, I've watched movies over multiple days before -- in fact I think I intentionally took four nights to watch Ben-Hur -- but it was a point of pride, for this landmark movie, to have something close to a real-time, consecutive viewing of those nine hours, all in one day, like the first audiences in October of 1985 presumably had. I arranged Saturday June 21st with my wife, and she gave me one of her bemused "you're crazy" looks and said "Sure."
Because the interesting thing to note about Shoah is, it's not naturally divisible into four parts, which is what they had to do to show it on PBS. The movie really does run like one long feature, and the divisions they've put in to change discs seem largely just that: instructions to change discs. Technically the film is divided into two parts, but each is more than four hours, and again, I could not tell if this was in the film at the time or put in later for our easier consumption. Either way, each part is way longer than most movies you've ever seen.
I don't want to keep you here reading this for as long as it took me to watch Shoah, but the rest of this post will be divided into two parts: 1) A timeline of my viewing of Shoah. Come on, you're dying to know how a person watches a nine-hour movie in one day, and who am I to deny you this? 2) My thoughts on the movie based on the notes I took.
Let's start the first part with a general strategy.
Obviously I can't just sit there for nine hours in a row and watch a movie. Even if I could handle it from a stamina perspective, which I could not, there were a few things required of me during the day. So I decided I would try to follow a system of taking a break every hour, as well as another break any time I had to change discs. Breaking the viewing up into manageable bites would make the whole thing more manageable, hopefully.
I should also fess up to something: I didn't only watch the movie. I did check baseball scores and that sort of thing. When you have something as long as this to watch, you have to use whatever strategy gets you through it without unduly compromising the experience of watching the movie.
Okay let's get to that timeline.
Timeline
7:29 a.m. Started movie. I had hoped to start closer to 7 a.m., but after checking the morning's baseball news and sleeping a few minutes later than I intended, this is when I actually started. My first viewing spot was in my office, on the old computer I mentioned previously, with a coffee and a mini chocolate chip muffin, the kind my younger son loves.
8:30 a.m. First break. Washed dishes from the night before, and took my son to his soccer practice, which was set to start at 9 a.m.
9:13 a.m. Started second hour in my car outside the soccer practice. I was going to take this hour off to take a walk during practice, which is my custom, but after only an hour of watching Shoah and getting a little later start than I intended, I knew I couldn't afford to fool around. You'll see later on that this was a good decision.
10:13 a.m. Finished second hour just about a minute before my son returned to the car at the end of practice.
10:32 a.m. Started remainder of Disc 1 back in my office at home.
10:59 a.m. Finished the 2:26 Disc 1. A quarter of the way there.
11:05 a.m. Started Disc 2.
11:15 a.m. Man came to the door to deliver four heavy boxes of rabbit food. (We have rabbits.) Had to pause for a few minutes.
12:08 p.m. Broke for lunch.
12:18 p.m. Resumed in my office, with my leftover meatloaf, broccoli and mashed potatoes all warmed up.
1:13 p.m. Disc 2 finished. Message says "Fin de le premiere epoque." I think this may refer to the fact that the movie was made over 11 years. (I couldn't really tell if things were being shown chronologically or not because there are no dates on screen.)
I also took this break to shower and restart my computer, which went into a mode where I couldn't call the screen back up. I worried that this foreshadowed technical problems that could prevent me from finishing the viewing, but it was the last thing for the day that was any sort of technical issue.
However, since I'd restarted my computer, I wasn't able to get my external DVD drive, which is attached by USB, to be recognized at first. While I was clicking through the various choices in My Computer, I remembered/realized that I actually have an internal DVD player on this computer, which is what I used for Discs 3 and 4.
1:48 p.m. Started Disc 3 and the "second period (epoque)" of the movie. Now I'm relocated to the couch in our garage, to give my back a bit of a rest.
2:53 p.m. Next scheduled hourly break.
3:04 p.m. Resumed on the living room couch. Both of my sons were now out of the house -- my younger one for a sleepover at his auntie's, the older one on a bike ride with his friends -- so my wife invited me out of the dungeon-like gloom of our garage and into the sunny living room. Note: This is the fourth and final viewing venue for the movie.
4:08 p.m. Next hourly stoppage for the longest break of the day. My older son had a 5 p.m. basketball game that's like a 20-minute drive from our house. They had a big comeback and won the game.
6:22 p.m. Resumed on the living room couch for the final 20 minutes of Disc 3.
6:42 p.m. Finished Disc 3.
6:54 p.m. Start of Disc 4.
7:37 p.m. Our Chinese delivery arrived. Ate dinner with my wife and watched an episode of The Studio.
8:18 p.m. Resumed.
8:44 p.m. Hourly break. With 1:20 left on Disc 4, decided I would skip my final break, which would come with only 20 minutes remaining, and just get it done.
8:50 p.m. Resumed.
10:10 p.m. FINISHED.
So in all, it took me 14 hours and 41 minutes to watch 9 hours and 4 minutes. That would have been a lot shorter, of course, if not for the 2 hour and 14 minute break to go to my son's basketball game. Which did probably help me with the necessary stamina to finish the viewing.
My thoughts
Well this is pretty much a masterpiece. Let me get that out of the way at the start before I present some reservations.
I think it makes sense to look at this in a chronological overview and then go into general thoughts.
I was a bit worried at the start. The very first thing that happens in Shoah is some expository text about one of the characters the film will follow -- pages and pages of it, in fact. I thought "What, nine hours is not long enough to actually tell this person's story on screen?"
Of course, that's not the sort of movie Shoah is. It has no voiceover, only interviews with the interview subjects, and of course questions from Lanzmann as their interviewer. (More on him in a moment.)
But at the very start I thought I was in for a long haul, and not just because the movie is about the length of three baseball games. The material in the very first portion of this film is mostly survivors visiting these areas where they came so close to death, four decades earlier. That's poignant, but not particularly distinctive, especially in terms of the way the Holocaust has subsequently been covered in our culture. I have seen quite a lot of films that have Holocaust subject matter, and though that's not Shoah's fault, because it undoubtedly got there first, it does mean that this material specifically was less likely to blow my mind and wrench my heart than it would have been if I'd seen it in 1985. (I think we also have to acknowledge that the very first part of this movie, like its first 15 minutes, were always going to be the hardest, since the enormity of how much remains is foremost in your thoughts.)
I have to say, though, that by Discs 2 and 3, I was fully in the thrall of this movie. The interviews started to give me material I hadn't gotten before in movies about the Holocaust, and make me consider things I hadn't considered before. By some point during Disc 3, I decided I was going to give Shoah five stars on Letterboxd as an absolutely vital document, the likes of which do not exist anywhere else out there in the cinematic landscape in general, and in Holocaust filmmaking in particular.
After Disc 4, I'm not so sure about that five stars. (I have not yet logged this on Letterboxd.) I may still go five stars, but I thought the momentum of the movie lost some steam in its final two hours, as it shifted to discussions of possible uprisings at the camps and in the Warsaw ghetto. This is not something I find as engaging, intellectually, as the descriptions of camp life and logistics that took up much of the middle 50 percent of this movie, and I did not find the interview subjects as compelling. For whatever reason -- and I really don't think it was exhaustion because I never felt too tired or like taking a nap -- Shoah diminished a little in its last quarter.
Who am I kidding, I will probably still give it five stars.
If you want to get an idea how the movie feels on the whole, it's a bit like 25 different interviews with survivors, participants or other related people, some of which run for a generous 20 to 25 minutes. Sometimes we see their talking heads, sometimes you are just getting the camera running over the landscape as it is in 1985 -- or, I suppose, anywhere from 1974 to when the film was finally finished in either 1984 or 1985.
Although most of what we see feels like it's taking place in the same period, we do also see some earlier interviews, particularly with a former SS soldier, that are black and white videos involving a clearly younger Lanzmann. To draw attention to the fact that these occurred at a different time, Lanzmann introduces a bit of artifice by having himself and some of his crew watch these on a video in the back of a van that functions as a mobile production studio for them, rather than just showing the video itself.
Though they would have every reason to be, very few of these people are an emotional mess. They speak about the events with some degree of matter-of-factness, and due to an interesting choice by the filmmaker, sometimes we don't know who we're hearing from and what this person's role was until the interview has been going on for ten minutes or even reached its conclusion. It's certainly a profound way of contextualizing what they've been saying.
I also want to talk a bit about Lanzmann and how impressive he clearly was. (He only just died in 2018.) Because many of the earlier presented interviews are with Poles, and he doesn't speak Polish, it takes a little while to get a sense of how many languages he truly does speak. In fact, the translations by his translator are something that contribute to some of the early pacing issues, because we'll hear a whole story in Polish without seeing any translation, then get subtitles only when the translator is explaining it to Lanzmann. (The right choice, I think, but it means these interviews take a lot more screen time.) And how impressive, by the way, is she, for having to remember and present as much as a minute of consecutive storytelling in Polish? (I'd be curious how close her translations are to what was actually said.)
But Lanzmann proves his linguistic prowess with interviews in both English and German, only using his native French with his own translator, and we see how important it is for him to have the ability to go back and forth with an interview subject in real time, given how he can coax things out of them or hold their feet to the fire. In the former case, it's getting truly wrenching testimony from victims or survivors. In the latter case, it's forcing people involved to admit some amount of culpability, pressing that "We have to do this," or refusing to let them dodge questions. This was obviously a consuming passion for the director, requiring nearly a dozen years of his life.
Because the length of this post is already well past ungainly, I wanted to finish with a few isolated takeaways from the subject matter, things that struck me as profound or otherwise noteworthy.
1) I was really absorbed by one particular interview in English with a man talking about how the Nazis' evil deeds where almost never spelled out literally and always referred to with euphemisms, such as "the final solution." He talks about how it was a sort of "nod and wink" scenario that led to "creativity" in how to implement "the final solution."
2) I read after the fact that Shoah was not received well in Poland, and I can see why. One interview subject, a Christian Pole, gives a pretty bad answer when asked about a distinction she makes in her comments between the word "Pole" and the word "Jew." We then get Lanzmann asking Christian Poles who observed what was happening in the ghettos if they miss the Jews or if they think their lives are better now than they were then, and the answers are disturbing. I found it fascinating to note how these people in the late 1970s/early 1980s had not yet developed today's sense of shrewdness about political correctness. Perhaps their understanding of the Holocaust and questions of complicity were just very unsophisticated at that time, but you get the sense they answer honestly without being able to hear how anything they're saying is actually sounding. They all talk about how many of the "Jewesses" were beautiful but that generally the people are "dishonest." Yikes.
During this whole section, the survivor we open on -- who was forced to sing for the Nazis along the river when he was a teenager -- has returned to the ghetto and is welcomed back enthusiastically by the locals who remember him. These same locals are saying these same ignorant things, directly in his presence, while he just continues to give an unbroken smile with only a hint of sadness, and only if you really look for it.
3) Something I had not yet learned, in my exposure to the history from this period, was how the Nazis would kill people in so-called "extermination vans," but piling them into the back of enclosed trucks and pumping exhaust from the vehicle into the enclosed space. The description of this was horrifying. They couldn't drive too quickly from one destination to the other or else the Jews in the back of the van would not be dead yet by the time they got there.
4) Speaking of horrifying, one interviewee talks about the "death panic" involved in the last few moments of life in the gas chamber. He talks about bodies spilling out of an opened chamber door like wood, and that they always have a pattern -- the stronger, bigger people on top, where they were climbing to get more air in the dark chamber, and the weaker, smaller, younger people on the bottom, their skulls smashed in the panic that ensued. I'm not sure if this person actually witnessed this or was just listing it as a "for example," but he makes mention of a father crushing the body of his own son -- because none of them could see anything and were fighting for their own lives.
5) Particularly interesting is one interview with a man who was forced to work as a barber in the gas chamber, cutting the hair that the Nazis would then reuse -- whose role was also designed to reduce panic amount the impending victims. I mean, why would they give you a haircut if you're about to die? Surely it'll all be alright? Although this man falls into the category of people who had no ideological role in anything related to Nazism and were essentially forced to do the things they did, and the things they did had no direct relationship with murder, he's clearly complicit in something, and it's this man who has a hard time continuing without Lanzmann pressing him and requiring him to continue. Interestingly, he's actually involved with cutting someone's hair during this interview.
There are plenty of other moments I could pluck out from over nine hours of movie an absorbing footage, but let's just say you and I have both been here long enough today.
I'll conclude with this thought:
The impulse to watch Shoah as my 7,000th movie may have had something of the gimmick behind it. A movie about the Holocaust should never be a gimmick in any way, shape or form.
But I'm so glad that the "stunt" of watching a nine-hour movie in one day -- 9:26, 9:04, what have you -- resulted in me finally becoming acquainted with this absolutely vital document of world history, full of first-person source information, about a topic we can never revisit too many times, because we are always learning more about its horrors -- and we should always be reminded never to forget them or let them happen again.
