The name of Claude Lanzmann will always be linked with his nine-and-a-half-hour epic Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985), the result of 11 years’ research and filming. His greatest cinematic achievement was to present the Holocaust through individual testimony – interviews with the “barber of Treblinka”, for instance, and members of the Sonderkommando units of prisoners forced to take bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria.

Although the film was rooted in the Polish Holocaust experience, Lanzmann, who has died aged 92, gave his audience a sense of the international scale of the so-called Final Solution and his interviews were shocking and compelling. He was the film-maker-as-spy, the Jew who pretended to be pro-Nazi in order to film the guilty. In one long sequence, he posed as a Nazi sympathiser and secretly filmed an SS officer who confided his past.

He shot 350 hours of testimony for Shoah and he later pillaged this archive to explore other Holocaust stories. Sobibor: October 14, 1943: 4pm (2001) told one of the most important resistance stories. American television had financed Jack Gold’s Escape from Sobibor (1987) as a feature film; Lanzmann wanted to make his documentary version through a single interview. He was outspoken in his criticism of feature films, believing that the Holocaust should never be illustrated – he thought that “image kills imagination”.

Focusing on Yehuda Lerner, one of the Sobibor resistance fighters, Lanzmann shows how 600 Jews, including some Red Army prisoners of war, made a run for freedom. He ends with the triumph of the Jews’ murder of their Nazi guards and their flight from Sobibor, but he does not follow the survivors back to Poland, where some were killed.

Lanzmann’s technique was compelling because he (some say cruelly) forced his interviewees to remember their most terrible experiences on camera. In the most famous Shoah sequence, Lanzmann asked the former Treblinka barber Abraham Bomba to talk about the cutting of the hair of a fellow barber’s family before they were about to be gassed. This is agony to watch. When questioned as to the morality of making those who suffered reveal their horror on screen, Lanzmann said: “One has to die with them again in order that they didn’t die alone.”

In A Visitor from the Living (1997), again derived from his Shoah footage, Lanzmann interviewed Maurice Rossel, head of the Red Cross committee responsible for inspecting Theresienstadt (now known as Terezín) in 1944. Rossel reported that it was a “model ghetto” and noticed “nothing terribly wrong”. Rossel freely and repeatedly expressed his view that Jews had “a passivity that I couldn’t stomach”.

A still from Shoah, 1985, showing the driver of a train on its way to Treblinka death camp

Two more films that grew out of the Shoah interviews were The Karski Report (2010), focused on the Polish resister Jan Karski who in 1942 gave some of the first information about the mass murders of Jews to the allies, and The Last of the Unjust (2013), about Benjamin Murmelstein, the Viennese rabbi who was charged as a collaborator in the postwar years.

Shoah had enormous impact on historians and Holocaust students but it was limited to television and film festival viewing and never had the blockbuster release treatment of such feature films as Schindler’s List and Sophie’s Choice. Not everyone approved of Lanzmann’s style. And when one critic suggested he adapt his work for the radio, he was furious, declaring, “You insult me. I make cinema. If you don’t understand that, I have nothing more to say to you.” Lanzmann was criticised for revealing postwar Poland as antisemitic and refusing to explore collaboration in his homeland, France.

He was born in Paris into a Jewish family, eldest of three children of Paulette (nee Grobermann) and Armand Lanzmann. His parents divorced when Claude was 12, and he and his brother, Jacques (later a well known writer), and sister, Evelyne (who became an actor), lived with his father in the Auvergne. Claude went to school at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, and at 18 joined the communist resistance during the occupation of France, fighting alongside his brother and father, and narrowly escaping the Gestapo. His mother was arrested several times but managed to escape. Although Lanzmann was not captured, this wartime experience was the seed for his work on Shoah.

After the war, he studied philosophy in Germany, at the University of Tübingen, and taught briefly at the Free University of Berlin. Then, as a journalist, he covered East Germany for Le Monde and was invited by Jean-Paul Sartre to contribute to the journal Les Temps Modernes, thus joining France’s intellectual left elite as a friend of Sartre and of Simone de Beauvoir (with whom he had a long relationship in the 1950s and whom he would succeed as editor of Les Temps Modernes). Also among his friends was François Mitterrand, the future French president, whose own war story was less than clear.

Lanzmann’s politics were of the left and he was a fierce opponent of France’s colonial war in Algeria. Later, however, he was seen to support the right in his uncritical documentary on the Israel Defence Forces, Tsahal (1994). Tear gas bombs were thrown at Paris screenings and there was violence when it was shown at the Melbourne Jewish film festival.

His autobiography, The Patagonian Hare, published in 2009, included an account of his visit to North Korea in the 1950s, and this became the basis of Napalm (2017), which was nominated for the Golden Eye documentary prize at Cannes. In 2013 he received an honorary golden bear, a lifetime achievement award, at the Berlin film festival. He was made a commandeur of the Légion d’honneur in 2006, promoted to Grand Officier in 2011.

Lanzmann’s films are not easy to watch. They have a rigorous investigative drive which is totally engaging. The boy who was hiding in France became the man who tracked down those who made him run – Lanzmann wanted to show the world that “one is responsible for what one does.”

He was twice divorced and is survived by his third wife, Dominique Petithory, and a daughter, Angélique, from an earlier relationship. His son, Félix, died in 2017.

• Claude Lanzmann, film director, born 27 November 1925; died 5 July 2018