So one of the reasons I was reluctant to watch this is that it’s too easy for Holocaust stuff to end up as… I guess “tragedy porn” for lack of a better word — things that take the awfulness of reality and put it to use as melodrama, wallowing in unearned pathos and undeserved tears. Think of something like Schindler’s List (which is all the more awful in that it performs that exploitation in the service of an unbearable heroic narrative about The Brave Non-Jewish Hero Who Did Good Just Like You Totally Would Have If You Had Been Around Then.)

So fortunately, this isn’t that. This is a sober-minded documentary that is working to capture history from the people who lived through it — by survivors of the camps, and also the people who lived near the camps, people who lived in the cities that were being emptied of their Jewish population, German railroad planners, and even some German military who were at the camps (filmed secretly and in contravention of promises from the filmmaker not to reveal their names or faces — a source of some ethical debate between “this is not acceptable documentary-making practice” vs. “yeah but a Nazi death camp guard come on”).

Yes, there are the recounting of tragedies and the survivors breaking down in tears — how could there not be? — but Lanzmann doesn’t prod at those moments; he lets them speak for themselves, and asks as much about the prosaic realities of daily life. In many ways, this is a documentary as much about the memory of the Holocaust, and how people thought of it by the 1980s (when this was filmed), as it is about the Holocaust itself.

It is very much a deliberate period piece of its time, a time far enough away from WW2 that there’s enough distance for a shared cultural picture of the Holocaust as unspeakably awful and universally hated to have emerged; but still close enough that a lot of people who were alive at that time — and who have firsthand experiences that are distinct from that broad cultural picture — are still alive to talk. It’s a period when events have passed into memory but not yet out of it.

One of the more difficult things that the movie spends some time on is the Poles. Because on the one hand, Poland was a country that was conquered by Hitler, and many Polish people were victims of the Nazis. So when the farmers who worked within sight of Treblinka in the ’40s seem weirdly cavalier about it, it is worth remembering that they were also keeping their heads down and trying not to attract the attention of a hostile occupying military.

But then too… the director brings one of the survivors of Chelmno back to the village, and the people there remember him as a boy in the camp (he was a worker, and made trips on the river boat where the Nazis made him sing) and are all so delighted that he survived, and it’s sort of a touching moment… until further questioning gets the villagers talking — with him still standing right there, increasingly stony-faced — about how the Jews had all the money and hid their gold in pans with false bottoms, and how this one rabbi said that the Jews deserved what happened because of what they did to Jesus; and in other interviews, the older women of the village talk sneeringly about the Jewish women who used to live there, and when asked if they are happy the Jews are gone, they answer basically that of course they’re appalled by the Holocaust, of course they are, but it would have been nice if the Jews had just left on their own.

One hates to fall into the trap of presentism, of looking at history through the lens of the current day, but especially at the moment, it’s hard not to do that at times in this segment — there is a lot of what we might today call “economic anxiety” expressed by the villagers about their former Jewish neighbors.

But that’s just one part of the film. There’s a lot in here; it’s nine hours, but it’s not a slow nine hours at all. (Lanzmann apparently filmed much, much more footage — hundreds of hours — and has released more of it as kind of supplementary material over time.)

This isn’t really enjoyable in any sense, but it is unquestionably a work of lasting importance and utterly essential.