This outstanding volume brings together a rich body of scholarship on the Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, which has been digitally archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and consists of 220 hours of unedited interview and location outtakes as well as sound tapes, interview summaries, and 7,300 pages of original transcripts. After more than twenty years of extensive archival and preservation work, the Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection (originally acquired by both the USHMM and Yad Vashem in 1996) is now publicly accessible on the internet; it is important to note that the collection includes more than forty interviews not included in Lanzmann's final cut (a guide to all the 16mm film reels is provided as an appendix in this volume).

Lindsay Zarwell and Leslie Swift, the two audiovisual archivists–researchers at the USHMM who have worked with the collection, explain in the opening chapter how the restoration, reconstruction, and preservation process was—due to advanced film decay in some negatives—oftentimes synonymous with a rescue mission. Zarwell and Swift shed light on the enormous labor and cost involved in this decades-long process, yet they also reflect on their own curatorial choices: “Lanzmann's treatment of women and their lack of inclusion in the final film has been and will no doubt continue to be a topic of intense study. Because of this, and because three of the four archive staff making preservation decisions were women, we were very interested in preserving and examining the interviews with female subjects” (49). Hence, the archivists’ first priority was to preserve the interviews with Ruth Elias, Hansi Brand, and Gertrude Schneider, who recollected difficult and painful events pertaining to infanticide and abortion. With this first chapter, the volume foregrounds the perspective of digital scholarship and practice, thus creating a dialectic tension between the theatrically released film Shoah (1985) and the visual archive containing the extended testimonies. Adding another discursive layer—the filmic archive as a concept—Sue Vice contends that we should not employ a hierarchizing principle (i.e., centering the edited film vis-à-vis less-relevant discarded footage) but instead examine both included and excluded visual materials in conversation with one another as “outtake and release depend on each other for their significance” (66). Vice maintains that such an approach encourages a proliferation of intertextual and intervisual analysis while further advancing the current scholarship and discourse on the making of Shoah.

A common thread that runs through all chapters is a commitment to engage with Shoah not as a self-contained media artifact but as a living film document with an almost endless potential for intertextual mediation. For Jennifer Cazenave, this coexistence between finished film and unused material opens up a novel discursive space to compose incompossibles (concept borrowed from Leibniz), allowing us to explore, compare, and contrast mutually exclusive variants. Cazenave argues that Lanzmann was “haunted by the incompossible” (91) when he opted to discard his interviews with members of the Jewish Councils and the Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest from his final product. In her close reading of (unused) sections of the interviews with Leib Garfunkel, Benjamin Murmelstein, Hansi Brand, and Hanna Marton, Cazenave probes survivor testimony that “problematize[s] Arendt's controversial claims of complicity” (109), allowing us to critically reconsider the triad model of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders.

Noah Shenker discerns that the additional outtake footage of Raul Hilberg (six hours in total) provides us with “a new conceptual lens through which to reinterpret Lanzmann's film” (117). Shenker also sheds light on how Lanzmann “negotiates the intersections of history and memory” (117) and tackles competing historiographies—such as the ones presented by Yehuda Bauer—which are left out of the final cut of Shoah. Dorota Glowacka discusses the consecutive phases of the film's reception in Poland from 1985 to 2010. Introducing the concept of co-witnessing, Glowacka also investigates the intricacy of verbal exchanges and “moments of rapprochement between Polish and Jewish witnesses” (158); she astutely notes that the rich tapestry of these voices escapes the filmmaker's attention and is thus not captured in his translation. For Gary Weissman, various instances of “mistranslation” (196) occur throughout Shoah as the subtitles fail to adequately convey the original testimonies in Polish, Hebrew, or Yiddish, instead translating the interpreters’ translations from French into English. He points out that the emphasis on the translated word “places paraphrase above living words” (198) and therefore adds another interpretative layer to the source languages. Weissman takes issue with those approaches that favor mistranslation “as a metaphor for the failure of communication” (201).

Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann approaches Lanzmann's interview outtakes with Benjamin Murmelstein from a different angle, introducing the “temporal concept” (208) as an organizing principle while drawing attention to Murmelstein's twofold representational role: he is both a historian and a historical actor who simultaneously re-enacts and interprets the past. In her chapter on perpetrator testimony, Erin McGlothlin revisits the question of dialectic tension between the edited material and the restored footage. Through a meticulous analysis of Lanzmann's postproduction editing practices in the extended interview segments with Franz Suchomel, McGlothlin illustrates that Lanzmann's authorial interventions were much more substantial and intrusive than he had originally disclosed. While Lanzmann created the impression that the interview with Suchomel represented a seamless and chronological flow of conversation, he had extracted shorter sections of dialogue from various parts of the raw footage, forcefully amalgamating them into a coherent whole. The result of this editorial manipulation creates a one-dimensional perpetrator narrative lacking “nuanced instances of ethical ambivalence” (256), while denying Suchomel the ability to express “moral agency, however ambivalent and incomplete” (263). The pervasiveness of Lanzmann's directorial and editorial interventions begs the question if a highly staged testimony—especially a survivor testimony—can be considered “a credible simulation” (280). Drawing on the interview scenes with Abraham Bomba, Brad Prager probes the relationship between testimony and performance, asking us to move beyond an adversarial, exclusionary, or binary framework. Instead, we are tasked with envisioning and conceptualizing testimony as both construction and performance.

Several chapters discuss the well-known concern that gendered experiences are largely excised or relegated to a supporting role in Shoah; the newly restored footage recovers these rejected testimonies, laying bare a much more intricate and differentiated relationship between female survival, memory recall, and witnessing. Thus, we could posit that the extended testimony archive at the USHMM functions symbolically as a belated form of restitution. Debarati Sanyal explains that testimonies given by women were, for Lanzmann, “incompatible with the masculine modes of traumatic identification staged by Shoah” (306). Sanyal also reminds us that Lanzmann's paradigmatic witness was afflicted by “traumatic complicity” (306) as he—the male survivor—was coerced into participating in the human destruction process in Chełmno, the Operation Reinhard killing centers, and in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The “gendered gray zone” (325) of Lanzmann's select female survivors did not conform to this paradigm. In the same vein, Markus Zisselsberger argues that Shoah's aesthetics of testimony disproportionally privileges male voices and experiences, affording them the sole authority “to testify to the fate of the [Jewish] community as a whole” (337). Female voices are predominantly mobilized for the purpose of enabling male-centered witnessing. The exclusion of individual female experiences from the Shoah master narrative is also at the core of Leah Wolfson's chapter. Wolfson aptly demonstrates that musical performances by Gertrude Schneider and Ruth Elias dismantle Lanzmann's “machinery of death [narrative]” as a “primary signifier for the Holocaust experience” (371). Instead, these songs—especially those contained in the digitized outtakes—evoke far more multilayered and contradictory meanings, resisting Lanzmann's authorial attempt to erase the specificity of gendered experiences in the Holocaust.

In the volume's final chapter, Regina Longo provides important insights into the outtake management process, her own extensive archival labor, and the film-to-digital preservation work of fellow archivists at the USHMM. It is fitting that this last contribution reveals the Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection to be a truly collaborative project drawing on the expertise, craft, and dedication of many film researchers, scholars, and archivists whose critical work often remains unacknowledged. Focusing on the complicated afterlife of Jan Karski's testimony, Longo challenges Lanzmann's assertion that he himself owned “exclusive authorship” (404) of all the footage. Longo rightly underscores that any follow-up productions incorporating outtake materials from the Shoah archive, such as The Last of the Unjust (2013), would not have been possible without the curatorial team at the USHMM.

Media and film scholars working on cinematic representations of the Holocaust will find this volume to be an invaluable resource. A few editorial points could have been addressed: several facts surrounding Lanzmann's modus operandi are established in earlier chapters and then repeated numerous times throughout the volume. It is also a missed opportunity—at least in my view—that the contributors do not more fully engage in a cross-disciplinary conversation with one another; especially given that several chapters deal with Ruth Elias’ truncated and largely dismissed testimony on the taboo of maternal infanticide. Yet these are minor quibbles that pale in light of the significance and breadth of the scholarship compiled in this collection. The Construction of Testimony opens up an important space for us to revisit established paradigms, unexamined assumptions, and canonized views surrounding the making of Shoah and the mythmaking of its creator. The volume brings to the fore the fact that both the research and the cinematic material Lanzmann collected since 1973 inherently challenged some dominant narratives in Holocaust studies. Yet, for the most part, Lanzmann decided to discard consenting testimonial accounts and competing voices that would have complicated his own authorial vision and self-referentially implicated him in the testimony-construction process. Bringing Lanzmann's multifaceted mode of production to light—thus reading Shoah against the intent of the filmmaker—this superb publication demonstrates that Lanzmann was even more of a maverick than he (re)presented himself to be.