French Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann at York U. for Holocaust Education Week Screening of A Visitor From the Living

TORONTO, October 26, 2000 -- French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann will be at York University on Tuesday, October 31st to attend a screening of his latest film, A Visitor From the Living, a gripping documentary of Lanzmann's three-hour interview with Swiss Red Cross official, Maurice Rossel.

Rossel was the only International Red Cross official to visit Auschwitz and the Czechoslovakian ghetto of Theresienstadt at the height of the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews. He reported that nothing was taking place that required any action. In the film, Lanzmann calmly and relentlessly guides Rossel to reveal himself as a man so wholly consumed by anti-semitism that he is incapable of perceiving the gravity of his deed.

"This film is both timely and timeless, as it makes us aware that issues of racism and hatred are not isolated in Germany but are everywhere, in every nation and community," said Shelley Hornstein, a professor of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York and co-organizer of the event. "The film jolts us into recognizing the evidence of this that is all around us: in crimes against humanity in Bosnia, in the resurgence of fascist movements across Europe, and in Canada, where we struggle on a daily basis to recognize the complexities of multicultural values." Hornstein is co-editor with York Prof. Florence Jacobowitz of a forthcoming book entitled, Image and Remembrance: Questions of Representation and the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Film.

Lanzmann, now in his early seventies, grew up in France, where he joined the communist resistance and eventually fled the Nazi invasion. After the war he studied philosophy in Germany, was befriended by Jean-Paul Sartre, and became a member of France's intellectual left as a journalist covering East Germany for Le Monde. He is most famous for his 1985 work, Shoah, a nine-and-a-half- hour epic description of the Holocaust that shuns archival footage and re-creation and relies almost exclusively on eyewitness accounts by survivors, bystanders and perpetrators. That film is now a staple in college curricula, and the 350 hours of raw footage is in the Holocaust Museum archives in Washington, D.C. The screening of A Visitor From the Living is a Harry Crowe Lecture of the York Centre for Jewish Studies in cooperation with Holocaust Education Week and co-sponsored with the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York, the Consulate General of France, and the Jewish Film Festival of Toronto. Lanzmann will be on hand to discuss the film after the screening and will deliver a graduate seminar at York during his visit. The film will be shown at 7:30 p.m. in Vari Hall "A", Keele Campus, York University, 4700 Keele St.

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For further information, please contact:

Prof. Shelley Hornstein
Faculty of Fine Arts
York University
(416) 736-2100, ext. 66623
shelleyh@yorku.ca

Prof. Michael Brown
Director
Centre for Jewish Studies
York University
(416) 736-5823

Susan Bigelow
Media Relations
York University
(416) 736-2100, ext. 22091
sbigelow@yorku.ca
YU/113/00