French filmmaker and journalist Claude Lanzmann has died in Paris at age 92.
ADVERTISEMENTFrench filmmaker and journalist Claude Lanzmann died in Paris at age 92 on Thursday. A spokesperson for his publishing house Gallimard told Variety Lanzmann passed after being "very very weak" for the past several days.
Lanzmann’s most celebrated work is his 10-hour long documentary film Shoah, which took 11 years to make and details the horrors of the Holocaust by personal testimonies of survivors and perpetrators. He used no archival footage in the film. In 1985, a complete transcript of all the interviews was published.
Lanzmann worked closely with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, famed philosophers who founded the left-wing paper Les Temps Modernes, of which Lanzmann eventually became editor-in-chief.
Lanzmann also focused his films and in-depth reporting on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said Shoah “changed the entire world’s perspective”.
The director continued making films even in his 90s, with his most recent work, the four-part series The Four Sisters, which was released this year.
He was awarded the highest French order of merit, the Legion of Honour, in 2006.