In 1985 the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann released his documentary Shoah to enormous critical acclaim. This oral history of the Holocaust ran for nine-and-a-half hours, and took the director almost 12 years of his life to research, shoot, and edit together. It stands today as a monumental achievement in preserving the testimony of one of human civilization’s worst wrongs, and has been preserved – including all 220 hours of raw footage – for posterity by the United Nations.

With All I Had Was Nothingness, photographer and director Guillaume Ribot has sifted through the extraordinary mass of footage to turn the camera back on Claude Lanzmann and explore how he went about making such an enormous, unwieldy film. Like Lanzmann’s own film, it is structured less as a documentary and more like a record. Lanzmann’s own journals provide the script for the film’s narration. It reveals the man in full, both good aspects and bad, including his dogged pursuit of the full story what happened in Poland as well as his penchant for manipulation of his interview subjects. Despite its overwhelming cultural and moral value, Shoah was not without its critics in 1985. The Polish government condemned the manner in which Lanzmann apparently indicted their lack of resistance to the Nazi invaders while neglecting to include those non-Jewish Poles who did fight to save as many Jews as they could. No less a critical authority than Pauline Kael – herself the child of Polish Jews – controversially described Shoah as ‘a form of self-punishment’.

I think it is worth keeping in mind that Shoah is not like other films, and only suffers from being compared to them. It is enormously valuable, and I deeply believe it is worth anybody tracking it down and experiencing the whole nine hour work, but it is understandable as challenging a watch as it is an important one.

There is, however, a question of the full worth of Ribot’s tribute to Lanzmann here. The truth is that Lanzmann shot so much footage for his original film that in succeeding years he found enough material to release five additional works of at least feature length. One of them, Four Sisters (2018), was four-and-a-half hours long by itself. I suppose All I Had Was Nothingness marks a sixth additional film – the new work is produced by Lanzmann’s widow and exclusively features material shot for Shoah.

By working with such sober, worthy source material, Ribot arguably makes his film critic-proof; surely criticising this documentary risks coming across as being dismissive of the Shoah itself? Surely though, there must be a point at which Lanzmann’s footage becomes whittled down to its least effective parts. What is presented here has some curiosity value, but feels more the domain of a supporting feature for a blu-ray than a work in its own right. Ribot’s film is only a sprightly 90 minutes, but it feels very dry and overly long – and why watch this when one can watch the original, profoundly effective film itself?

If there is value to Ribot’s film, it is that it reminds audiences of Lanzmann’s great achievement and the messages it contains. On its own merits, this honestly feels like a footnote to a vastly more important text.

All I Had Was Nothingness is screening at the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival. Click here for more information.