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Ladies and gentlemen,

Dear friends of the Jewish Community Center,

It is for me an honour and a privilege to introduce Claude Lanzmann this evening to such a distinguished audience, in this venue that has hosted so many fascinating conversations with foremost international intellectuals, artists and writers.

Tonight’s presentation illustrates the eminent role played by this institution in facilitating captivating exchanges with the public of San Francisco. One could not have thought of a better host for Mr. Lanzmann’s appearance in our city.

Our guest today has travelled a long and rich journey, both in space and in time, to offer to us a glimpse on a life and a career brilliantly narrated in his recently published memoir, “THE PATAGONIAN HARE”,a book that has generated a tremendous interest since its publication in France in 2009.

I hope that Jean-Paul Sartre’s friend and fellow will not object to a perhaps too common characterization : to many of us, Claude Lanzmann is indeed the embodiment of the “intellectuel engagé” – the committed intellectual, if I may use an approximate translation for this very French phrase… A fighter who does not pull his punches, a challenger of convenient truth and conformity.

Since his teenage years when he joined the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation, Mr. Lanzmann’s life and works have made him a prominent figure of intellectual life, in France and beyond, as a writer, journalist and filmmaker.

It is not an easy task to try and summarize such a rich and diverse career in few minutes. After all, Mr. Lanzmann’s memoir is a robust 560 page volume!

Of course I am sure that many of us have seen his masterpiece SHOAH, an unprecedented and unrivalled cinematic oral and visual history of the genocide that took him eleven years to complete. SHOAH is considered a milestone in the history of cinema and in the debate on the philosophical and ethical problems of the mainstream representations of the Shoah.

With its in-depth interviews with survivors, perpetuators and bystanders, the film has been described as a “documentary of absences”: there is no newsreel footage, there are no old photos, no archival documentation, but the voices, the testimonies, a story made out of traces.

Since its release in 1985, SHOAH has changed the paradigm on the genocide, against distortions and subtractions from reality, against its commodification by the film industry.

If I may quote Claude Lanzmann himself :

“when watchingSHOAH, one bearswitness for nine hours 30 minutes to the incarnation of the truth, the contrary of the sanitization of historical science."

The importance of SHOAH has been recognized by numerous awards, such as the New York Film Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Film Critics Award, and the Peabody Award.

One could say that philosophy, or rather philosophy in action, is at the core of Mr. Lanzmann’s life and works.

After the Liberation of France, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, and then, following his interest in Germany, he went to Tübingen University and lectured on French litterature and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. While in Berlin, he began his career as a journalist, revealing with his first article the persistence of Nazism in the university system in Germany.

He also published an account of his travels through East Germany for the French newspaper Le Monde. This series of articles inspired Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoirto invite him to collaborate with them as editor of their journal Les Temps Modernes in 1952, of which he is chief editor. The most prestigious of French journals, Les Temps Modernes, with about 600 issues so far, is a landmark in the cultural and political field, in France and abroad and its name is, 67 years after its creation, still well deserved.

While being at the helm of Les Temps Modernes, Claude Lanzmann pursued his career as a film maker, with documentaries such as TSAHAL, a courageous account on the terror of war, and the basic human instincts of survival soldiers have to rely on when confronted with death.

In A VISITOR FROM THE LIVING, Claude Lanzmann interviewed Mr. Rossel, a Swiss member of an International Red Cross inspection party sent to visit the Theresienstadt concentration camp and showed in a powerful way the fact that his interviewee closed his eyes and believed in the reality that was staged by the Nazis for his visit only.

InSOBIBOR, Claude Lanzmann tells a story about a unique event in the history of concentration camps when six hundred inmates organized the mass revolt and escape in the Sobibor camp in Poland.

In 2010, Mr. Lanzmann released THE KARSKI REPORT in response to the novel by French author Yannick Haenel whose publication triggered a controversial debate.

Mr. Lanzmann’s unique achievements have been recognized by the French Government with his induction in the Order of the Legion of Honor last year.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time now that I yield the microphone to our guest.

Regina Longo, film and media archivist, is here this evening to interview Mr. Lanzmann. And providing translation is Carol Cosman.

Please join me in welcoming them all to the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.