This chapter explores the enduring potency of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) for illuminating the nature of event, memory, witnessing, and testimony (testimony to a private and collective trauma). It considers the implications of a film that some view as a documentary—but which this chapter considers, rather, as one of the greatest works of art of our times—a film that, in an unparalleled and paradoxical way, refuses systematically to use any historical, archival footage. The chapter argues that Lanzmann’s work of stark originality is a radically unprecedented cinematic, artistic and philosophical creation, about the witnessing of a shattering historical catastrophe, viewed from the present, that is, from the corporeal and emotional presences of the human beings who were once its protagonists (its executioners, its victims, its bystanders). As the chapter recalibrates our sense of witnessing, of seeing, and of what counts as bearing witness to an unthinkable event, it explores why Lanzmann should be understood himself as an innovative kind of cinematic witness—indeed, as a profoundly philosophical filmmaker, witness in the second degree of a cataclysmic history, whose living corporeality resists becoming simply past.