Shoah

Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, released in 1985, runs nine and a half hours and is made up entirely of contemporary testimony from Holocaust survivors, perpetrators and bystanders. Lanzmann shot for eleven years across fourteen countries, from 1973 to 1985, and on principle refused to use any archival footage of the camps: every image was recorded after the fact, on the sites of destruction themselves (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chełmno) or in the homes of the people speaking. It sits permanently in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll, and we would call it the most important documentary ever made.

Lanzmann's interview method was deliberate and at times brutal. He used hidden cameras when he needed to (he tricked one former SS officer into giving testimony), kept the slow bilingual translation on screen so that the work of finding each word stays visible, and would not let his subjects retreat into talk of Hitler or of evil, holding them instead to timetables, ovens, witnesses, neighbours. The Polish villagers who lived next to the camps, the Auschwitz barber who had to cut the hair of women he knew, the Treblinka train conductor: these are the most-cited interviews in Holocaust literature.

Simon Srebnik singing on the Chełmno river, the opening sequence, has become the most-quoted shot in documentary. Lanzmann described his project as a refusal of the consolation of representation, and Shoah is the film that made that refusal a permanent ethical option in cinema.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most necessary film ever made about the Holocaust, and the work that defined what documentary witness could demand. Few works in any medium take their own subject this seriously.