DAYEINU! Film Programs

Saturday, November  2, 1:30 – 10:30 PM at the Gallery Theater, Bucknell University

SHOAH

Claude Lanzmann (France 1985) 550 min.
Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.

Tuesday, November  5, 7PM at the Campus Theatre

SOBIBÓR, OCTOBER 14, 1943, 4 P.M – Special Guest Michael Renov !

Claude Lanzmann (France 2001) 95 min. DCP. French and Hebrew with English subtitles.

The subject of a retrospective at New York City’s Quad Cinema in 2018, Claude Lanzmann changed cinema; with his most famous film, Shoah, Lanzmann established his cinematic legacy as historian, keeper of the flame, educator and truth-teller. All too aware that there was more to be done in the face of indifference and/or misinformation, Lanzmann continued for decades to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about 20th-century Jewish experience as well as the art of documentary. In Sobibor, he interviews Yehuda Lerner, who survived the Shoah and escaped from multiple concentration camps. One such incident, at the titular camp/day/time, was an inmate uprising in which several guards were killed before the prisoners fled into the nearby woods. While unique in Lanzmann’s oeuvre because of its focus on resistance and survival, the film also confronts the reality of the death camps’ years-long toll (Adapted from Quad Cinema program notes). Introduced by Michael Renov, Haskell Wexler Endowed Chair in Documentary for the Division of Cinema & Media Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. 

Wednesday, November  6, 7PM at the Campus Theatre

“Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment and Public Memory”

Round table discussion. Film excerpts from: Night and Fog, Schindler’s List, Shoah and The Maelstrom. Panelists: Special Guest Cinema & Media StudiesProfessor Michael Renov (University of Southern California); Film/Media Studies Professor Ken Eisenstein (Bucknell); German Studies Professor Rebekah Slodounik (Bucknell); and Rabbi Nina Mandel (Congregation Beth El, Sunbury).