Ziva Postec. La monteuse derrière le film Shoah

“It was the pinnacle of my career”, says editor Ziva Postec of Shoah, the monumental Holocaust documentary she edited between 1979 and 1985. She and director Claude Lanzmann (1925-2018) were a good team, she says: he a journalist, she with her film background, even though “Lanzmann wasn’t an easy man”. Postec, born in Israel in 1940, moved to Paris in 1961, where she worked as an (assistant) editor for the likes of Alain Resnais, Jean-Pierre Melville and Orson Welles.

This film tells her life story, emphasing the period when she was editing Shoah, selecting from 350 hours of footage. Lanzmann shot seven to twenty hours of footage for each interviewee (victims and perpetrators). Footage which Postec then “edited like lacework”, punctuated by shots of the “guilty landscape”. When Shoah was finally finished (running at over nine hours), Postec collapsed from exhaustion for three months. In 1986 she returned to Israel, where she still lives.

Trailer

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