At the end of my week-long reprieve in Hyères, Claude Lanzmann unexpectedly passed away on Thursday, July 5^th, some five-hundred miles to the north in Paris. He was 92 years-old. The cause of his death is unclear; Gallimard, his publisher, has only reported that he had been ill and very weak in recent days.

I was finishing some morning errands and preparing for a lunch date when a friend texted me a link to an article in the French daily, Le Parisien. My eyes widened as I read the headline: “Claude Lanzmann, réalisateur de ‘Shoah’, est mort.” It was an announcement I had long-anticipated and yet I was still caught off-guard in the moment of its realization.

Just the night before, I had been asked if I ever planned to meet Lanzmann. The question arose during a reunion with a family in Hyères that I had lived with years ago while studying French. That evening, I learned that their father had lost four aunts in Auschwitz and that he and his wife had visited Israel several times. When they inquired about the possibility of my meeting Lanzmann, I replied that it might happen one day but I would need time to fully develop the project and build the right contacts. In actuality, it was a prospect I only loosely entertained given the disparity between Lanzmann’s age and the infancy of my work. Also, such a possibility seemed like icing on the cake rather than a vital ingredient for the book to develop. Still, he is obviously someone with whom I would have eventually wanted to share the fruits of my labor.

Lanzmann at the New York Film Festival in October 2017.

Lanzmann’s death coincided with the theatrical release of his final series of films, Les Quatre Soeurs [The Four Sisters] in Paris, Lyon, and Nice. Culled from the hundreds of hours of footage accumulated for Shoah in the 1970s, Lanzmann’s final work is a quartet of films that present the stories of four different women who survived the Holocaust, two of whom appeared briefly in Shoah. Among its many layers of significance, Les Quatre Soeurs might be considered a corrective to the gender imbalance in Shoah, which overwhelmingly focuses on the testimony of men. Last October, Lanzmann appeared at Lincoln Center for the debut of Les Quatre Soeurs at the New York Film Festival. Richard Brody wrote a dispatch for The New Yorker about it; the films are scheduled for a wider release in North America in fall 2018. Les Quatre Soeurs not only represents the final touches on a storied career but also the stubborn vitality of Lanzmann as a filmmaker and the inexhaustibility of his Shoah project as a whole. Although it’s been nearly half a century since he filmed these interviews, it seems that we are just discovering them for the first time. Indeed, Shoah itself could be construed as the first edit of the vast testimonial archive he collected. His final artistic gesture returns us to this germinal source and the ever-expanding interpretive work it entails.

I know Lanzmann has died but in some sense it doesn’t feel like he is gone. His life was an impassioned stride toward the monumental—to immerse oneself in his work is to still feel its boundless range and ceaseless reverberation.