The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs approached Claude Lanzmann in 1973 and suggested that, with Israel’s backing, he make a documentary film about the murder of the European Jews. Lanzmann was and is a French journalist, and his qualifications for undertaking such a project were obvious at a glance. He had spent many years producing copy for the glossy French magazine Elle and, then again, for mass-­readership newspapers. He sat on the editorial committee of Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes. He was handy with a film camera. Also, he had displayed an acute sympathy for the plight of the Israelis — a less-than-­universal trait even in those days.

The proposed topic was vast, though, and the necessary research, endless. By 1977, he still had nothing to show for his efforts, and the impatient Israelis canceled the funding. Lanzmann responded by tripping down a stairway and fracturing a foot. “The Patagonian Hare” is his autobiography, and the book makes clear that pratfalls in a distinctly cinematic style — a car crash, an overturned boat, Alpine hiking disasters, a run-in with a plate-glass window — have punctuated his life the way skin rashes might announce the anxieties of someone more conventionally neurotic.

He bounces back, however. In Israel, Menachem Begin and the Likud replaced the previous government, and Lanz­mann made his way to Begin in person to plead for another chance. The new government approved, on the condition that Lanzmann sign a statement promising to limit his film to a modest two hours and to complete it within a year and a half. Lanz­mann signed. Only, as he blithely confesses, he had not the slightest intention of completing the work anytime soon, nor was he planning a simple afternoon at the movies. He was already groping his way toward what would eventually be known as “Shoah,” his colossal masterwork about the death camps and the Jews, nine and a half magisterial hours long. He felt conflicted about deceiving the Israelis, though. This time he responded by ignoring the warning signs on an Israeli beach and was rescued only by a random ­passer-by with lifeguard skills.

He toured the United States, trying to charm the flush philanthropists of Jewish America into supplying additional support. The Americans were uncharmable. In Lanzmann’s account, they wanted to hear that his film was going to deliver a useful “message” — something like “never again” or “love one another.” Steven Spielberg eventually delivered messages of that sort in “Schindler’s List,” having to do with hope, the triumph of good over evil and so forth. But Spielberg’s movie dwells on the ne plus ultra of marginal themes — a story of Jews who survived because they had fallen into the hands of the world’s only kindhearted Nazi.

This was not for Lanzmann (nor does Lanzmann seem to adore Spielberg, whose name appears in “The Patagonian Hare” in studiously cool tones). Lanz­mann was intent on filming the main thing, and not anything marginal — the main thing being “the extermination of a people,” in his phrase. Or something more existential yet: “The subject of the film would be death itself, death rather than survival.” Only it was not obvious how to make such a film. A conventional documentary might have assembled images from the 1940s. But a montage of old photographs and newsreels would have ended up demonstrating merely that time had passed. Besides, as he remarks, no one had ever taken a camera into a gas chamber to photograph the killings (even if some people claim otherwise), nor did light enter the chambers once the door had closed — a filmmaker’s observations. Nor had anyone survived a gassing to describe the experience later on. Nor had anyone returned from the dead — though in a couple of odd and tasteless passages that supply the title of his book, Lanz­mann muses on the hares at Auschwitz-Birkenau as reincarnations of murdered Jews.

He came up with the grand inspiration to train his camera, instead, on what was, during the years he worked on the film, the present day. Verdant landscapes became his theme. And he set out to find people who, in the past, had pressed their noses, as it were, against the main thing, and whose faces in the present might communicate living memories. The most gripping pages of “The Patagonian Hare” recall his interview with a barber named Abraham Bomba, who went about clicking his scissors at a barbershop in Tel Aviv as he recounted his wartime experiences in Treblinka, Poland. The SS wanted to transport bags of human hair to Germany, and, with this object in mind, assigned the barber to cut off the hair of already naked women in the moments before they were ushered into the chamber, or when they were already inside.

Lanzmann reminds us that, as the interview proceeded, the barber, pressed almost cruelly by Lanzmann to go on speaking, began to lose control over his emotions. And Lanzmann interrupts his own narrative to boast about how much directorial skill went into filming the barber’s eyes. There is something schoolboyish in his book, not just in this one self-­congratulatory passage. But why shouldn’t Lanz­mann boast? His interview with the Barber of Treblinka will be remembered for as long as civilization remains civilized. The barber did not have a “message,” though: only a look of devastated anguish. It is a relief to learn that, after the interview had drawn to a close, the barber and Lanzmann embraced.

The most remarkable of Lanzmann’s confessions in “The Patagonian Hare” touch on his interviews with old Nazis. A solid dose of deception went into some of those interviews — which he acknowledged on screen by showing us a fully identified veteran of the SS as he asks for a reassurance of anonymity and receives one, too. But the autobiography reveals how elaborate those deceptions sometimes were. Lanzmann invented a research institute, to which he impishly assigned the street address of Sartre’s magazine. And, on the basis of his fake credentials, he talked his way into the homes of old Nazis, accompanied by an assistant concealing a tiny camera and sound transmitter, while a truck lurked outside, picking up the miked ­conversations.

He deceived the Polish government, which in those days was Communist, into granting him permission to interview the peasants who lived next door to the camps. The Polish interviews aroused all kinds of controversy when the film was finally shown, on the grounds that Lanz­mann’s scenes of peasant anti-Semitism represented Poland unfairly. In “The Patagonian Hare” he responds by muttering about what he calls, a little peevishly, the “Polish lobby.” In truth, his movie displays two sides of Poland: the appalling peasants, but also the resistance courier Jan Karski, a hero of the war. The complaint missed the point of the movie, in any case. “Shoah” is not about Poland.

The abrasive spirit that Lanz­mann brought to his film and brings again to his autobiography — the casual disdain for superficial courtesies, the sometimes brazen confessions — appears to derive from a peculiar mix of French experiences, beginning with the wartime Resistance. Lanzmann was a high school student during the occupation, secretly enrolled in the Communist Youth. He fought in a series of battles, described here in a tone of derring-do. He idolized Britain’s Spitfire pilots. But then, postwar, he made his way into his mother’s world of Parisian arts and letters and ultimately to Sartre’s magazine.

Social behavior around the magazine did not reliably adhere to the bourgeois norm. Sartre and his fellow philosopher Si­mone de Beauvoir formed a glamorous and mischievous couple of sorts, each ensconced in a separate apartment, presiding over an ever-changing and sometimes slightly incestuous ménage of lovers and seductions. Lanzmann was 20 years younger than Sartre and 17 years younger than Beauvoir, but, after a while, he took his place not just at the editorial meetings but within the ménage, installed by Beauvoir in her own apartment and brought along on her decorous vacations with Sartre. “The Patagonian Hare” recounts some amusing incidents along these lines, together with a smattering of tales of Paris brothels and loves won and lost from Israel to North ­Korea.

But he also recounts a darker incident in the history of the ménage involving his sister. The sister was an actress under the stage name Évelyne Rey and had a variety of lovers from the intellectual world. She starred in one of Sartre’s plays and was taken up secretly by the philosopher himself, who installed her in an apartment near his for two or three years, until she grew exasperated at the secrecy. And then, after a couple of additional romantic setbacks at the hands of brainy men, she committed suicide, as if the experience of being ill used by one bookish big shot after another had fatally worn her out. Lanz­mann and his intimate circle displayed her corpse for almost 10 days in her apartment before proceeding to a funeral — a ghoulish detail.

But what strikes me about the chapter on his sister is Lanz­mann’s passing observation that, during the war, she converted to Catholicism. He reserves comment. The question of Jewish identity figures repeatedly in the book, though, and does so in a particularly dramatic fashion. This is because the Lanzmann family were originally Eastern European Jews who, after a while, assimilated so thoroughly into French life that, when the time came for young Claude to contemplate his roots and the whys and wherefores of anti-­Semitism, the only place to which he could turn for wisdom was the cosmopolitan and distinctly non-Jewish left, which meant Sartre himself, the oracle.

He studied Sartre’s brilliant and inadequate essay, “Anti-Semite and Jew,” from 1946, a classic product of the Resist­ance. Sartre was sympathetic in the postwar years to the Zionist project, and young Lanz­mann became more than sympathetic. Sartre and Beauvoir threw themselves into a brave solidarity campaign for the Algerian independence fighters against France, and Lanzmann did the same. It was Lanzmann who introduced Sartre to Frantz Fanon, the grand theoretician of anticolonial revolution — which led Sartre to confer a worldwide prestige on Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” by contributing a preface extolling revolutionary violence: a baleful moment in the history of modern ideas.

And yet, from Lanzmann’s standpoint, every aspect of the political agitation over Algeria, and not just the question of terrorism, turned out bitterly. He was shocked when certain leaders of the Algerian revolution revealed themselves to be, in their moment of victory, anti-­Israel and pro-polygamy — though he also confesses that during the struggle itself he had silently harbored a few doubts. Sartre put Lanzmann partly in charge of editing a thousand-page historic issue of Les Temps Modernes in 1967, dedicated to bringing Israeli and Arab intellectuals into a productive dialogue. But the Arab contributors to the issue never did genuinely engage with their Israeli counterparts.

Lanzmann shudders with regret at having allowed a Jewish Marxist to lead off the issue with an anti-Israel screed. He brought Sartre to Israel that same year and was disturbed to see that, by then, the great man himself was dogmatically opposed to speaking to anybody at all in the Israeli Army, even when the introductions were provided by an Israeli leftist (though, under Lanz­mann’s pressure, Sartre ended up halfheartedly supporting Israel in the 1967 war). And so, by reciting a series of regrets and confessions, Lanz­mann reveals that he created his thoroughly Sartrean “Shoah” only by being a disciple of Sartre who has spent a lifetime rebelling against Sartre — reverently, reluctantly and incompletely. Even now Lanz­mann remains the editor of Les Temps Modernes, which makes him Sartre’s heir, institutionally speaking. Here is the torment of the assimilated Jewish left — a giant theme, which cries out for its Virgil or its Dante.

“The Patagonian Hare” is poetically intense in places, chatty elsewhere, sometimes dragged down by Lanzmann’s resentments and vendettas. The translation by Frank Wynne — whose translation of the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal’s novel “The German Mujahid” I admire — exudes in its punctuation and some untranslated phrases an espresso aroma of the French original, sufficiently to remind you that French is, in fact, the origin. The result seems to me, all in all, an uncomfortable book, doubly so right now, given the news from Iran and the Middle East. To read is to twitch. But this is not to Lanz­mann’s discredit. An uncomfortable book is what you would expect and even demand of an autobiographer who, in his capacity as filmmaker, can only be regarded as one of the supreme narrators of modern Jewish (and not just Jewish) experience.

Paul Berman is the author of “The Flight of the Intellectuals” and “Power and the Idealists.”