While he had an extensive career as journalist, editor, public intellectual, and lover of Simone de Beauvoir, it was with Shoah, a 9½ oral history of the Holocaust widely considered one of the greatest documentary films ever made, that Lanzmann gained world renown. He never retired: his final film, Napalm (about his youthful affair with a nurse in North Korea), and his miniseries The Four Sisters were both completed last year.