Its riveting nine hours are perhaps the most important piece of historical cinema we possess.

With his 9 1/2-hour Shoah, Claude Lanzmann has accomplished the seemingly impossible: He has brought such beauty to his recounting of the horror of the Holocaust that he has made it accessible and comprehensible.

By straightforwardly presenting interviews with people who lived through the Holocaust, Lanzmann makes it real again. Even more impressively, he helps us to see how the horror could have happened.

Lanzmann's goal is not really to describe or recreate the experience or the horror of the Holocaust. It is to show the inability of words, or images, or imagination, to make the experience and the horror present.