The Karski Report (TV)

Claude Lanzmann’s new documentary—composed almost entirely of footage from interviews that he filmed in 1978 with Jan Karski, an officer in the Polish underground during the Second World War, but didn’t include in “Shoah”—presents a vivid and meticulous account of one of the most historically significant political discussions ever to take place. Karski explains that, in 1943, he went on a mission to Washington, D.C., to brief President Roosevelt on the state of the Polish resistance, as well as on the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and the Belzec concentration camp, to which he was a witness. Roosevelt then sent Karski to speak with the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a Jew, who, upon hearing Karski’s description of the horrors befalling Jews in Poland, spoke words that Karski reproduces, for Lanzmann’s camera, with a theatrical fervor that embodies the shock he felt upon hearing them: “I do not believe you.” Lanzmann’s film confronts epochal conundrums in moral epistemology—the leap of faith required to conceive the inconceivable and to recognize what Karski calls the “unprecedented,” and the paradoxical primacy of oral testimony as a mode of representation and understanding—which are at the core of “Shoah” and of the cinema itself.