CINE World (Dec 1963)

(CONCLUDED FROM PAGE 12) ye | pened twenty years ago in the pit of hell known as the Auschwitz camp, from the vantage point of a modern European woman traveler and young wife who tries to conceal her past, to soften it, to make it palatable and comprehensible in the terms of human moral values. Munk had shot about 6,000 feet of material of the Auschwitz scenes, that is the whole of the flashback. He had also shot some footage of the action that takes place on board the liner. Those who presented the film did not shoot a single foot of it. They saw their task in the same way as an archaeologist would: they did not complete the damaged sculpture, they did not carve any new elements, but tried to put together the pieces they found and to project the shape of the whole. The unfinished part of the film, the incomplete present tense, is stat ic. A series of stills were selected from Munk’s material. Unfinished gestures, frozen facial expressions compel us to guess only at the dramatic conflict between the characters. The rest is filled in by the commentary, whose purpose is to provide the motive for the flashback. Munk speaks himself in the pictures of the past and the scenes which he completed. Here the film takes on the dimension of a masterpiece. Who knows, perhaps this is the best Munk has ever done. The Auschwitz camp, the horror of Nazi German torture, is not a new subject in films. The Russians have made films on this topic, there is the Polish “The Last Stage” and recently the Italians have made the interesting film Kapo, starring Susan Strasberg. Nevertheless Munk showed something new, something that had never been shown before. If one were to look for the artistic lineage, one would have to turn toward surrealism. But his surrealism does not have its roots in a mannerism, in intellectual speculation but has been suggested by life. For just imagine an expanse of some scores of acres, an area of a medium-sized manufacturing plant. Millions of people pass through this area. They come from the side of life, with hope of life, in their normal clothes with their wives, children and luggage only to find death in the Auschwitz “factory.” A wholesale death, organized like a production line, a nameless and naked death, without any ceremony. The death of millions have left a terrible odor. Everything we see on the screen, the piles of personal possessions left by the dead, the absurd stacks of baskets, the pyramids of valises, ranks of baby carriages — everything reeks of death. These pictures create an eerie atmosphere, an overpowering climate of destruction. Through the whole film, one can almost hear the trample of human throng which moves somewhere beyond the eye of the camera, but which one feels is streaming in an endless flood from here to eternity, from life to death, from memory to oblivion, Against the background of the Auschwitz death factory, Munk sketched the complex drama of a struggle between this one supervisor of the camp and one chosen woman prisoner, a struggle between the persecutor and the victim. The drama runs a devious course, with many fine shadings and with great psychological insight. In her recollection of the past in the camp, today’s lady of the luxury liner and, yestarday’s persecutor, tries to give the past a human dimension. She convinces herself that there, in the past, there was some emotional motivation. But the whole action takes place in the mud of Auschwitz. Mud trampled by millions of dead feet, mud into which millions of living bodies had sunk. It is the mud that protests against the lies and the excuses. The mud is the only important witness of the truth. And this is what Munk showed in his film. It may be that he would have said even more if the film had been completed. Looking at the noble alloy which has been salvaged, thanks to his friends and collaborators, one may guess at the full shape of the masterpiece and wait listening for the unspoken final word. (“POLAND")