SALT FOR SVANETIA (Mikheil Kalatozishvili, 1930)

It is an odd “documentary” that begins with a script, in this case, by Sergei Tretyakov, and indeed Mikheil Kalatozishvili’s silent Sol Svanetij is largely staged. It also swoons with selfconscious lyricism and is sickeningly cruel and violent.
     The film’s ostensible subject is the Svans, whose primitive, isolated Ukrainian existence copes with mountainous, snow- and glacier-ridden terrain. The scarcity of salt is both real and representative of the people’s hard lot. (We are shown a cow drinking human urine for the salt.) The film ends with the building of a road to connect Svanetia to salt and civilization. It was news to the Svans, who felt exploited by the filmmakers, that they weren’t “civilized.”
     In a long, grueling passage, a horse is ridden until its heart explodes from the furious galloping. One recalls Orson Welles’s great pride in the fact that not a single horse was injured during the filming of Chimes at Midnight (1966).
     The film’s best parts are the opening, which visually describes the location, and passages showing local labor, such as farming—there’s a shot from the viewpoint of a beast of burden—and the making of yarn, caps and rope out of lamb’s wool. However, a vignette of past warfare between freedom-loving folk and evil barons is close to ridiculous, as is a killer avalanche. Documentary material, then, surpasses the staged material; but the latter takes over.
     Kalatozishvili blames religion for the people’s “backwardness.” A sequence cross-cuts between a “rich” man’s opulent funeral ceremony and the ordeal of a pregnant peasant who has been driven from her home. The ox that is ritually slaughtered to honor the dead man might have fed the poor. The woman, alone in the wilds, gives birth. A dog licks the resultant blood for salt.

THE LAST STOP (Wanda Jakubowska, 1947)

From Poland, Wanda Jakubowska’s necessarily Soviet-approved death camp film is based on her own and co-scenarist Gerda Schneider’s imprisonments in Auschwitz. (Jakubowska had been a resistance fighter.) Stark, bleak, bitterly ironic, Ostatni etap (The Last Stage; The Last Stop) details the life of a Nazi concentration camp from the inside out. It calmly observes cruelty and madness of an inconceivable order, never becoming cruel or mad itself.
     Its protagonist is Jewish; Martha Weiss arrives at the camp with her family in the dead of night. Fluent in German, she interprets hellishly barked German orders for Polish prisoners, in effect finding her own individual voice, and her voice as a woman, in the process. In time, she loses her entire family but finds another, forged by female solidarity.
     The crematorium is introduced, in long-shot, early on. Later, closer up, it is mistaken for the camp factory. Prisoners, along with the film’s audiences, will have to learn gradually the truth of the horror of the camps. The film opens with an overhead shot of prisoners standing in countless, endless rows in the mud. Psychologically, Jakubowska’s film takes us, by degrees, underneath the mud.
     The trains’s nighttime arrival has drawn criticism from some quarters; prisoners apparently usually arrived by day.* But the black-and-white film is altogether dark, and the train’s arrival, increasingly in closeup, brings a waking nightmare to historical light. The routine tattooing of prisoners with camp numbers is miniscule routine; but it encapsulates the dehumanization of prisoners and contrasts with the overflowing humanity we witness amongst the prisoners in their barracks. On the other hand, forced outdoor choral rehearsals punctuate barbaric acts of German cruelty.
     We witness camp labor. We listen to every word. The death march of children pierces like nothing else in cinema.

* Mindy Aloff e-mailed me the following: About the nighttime arrivals at Auschwitz, and the tattoos: in a recent, minutely researched biography of Eichmann, there is information about some nighttime arrivals. Olga Lengyel also speaks of one in her survivor’s memoir, “Five Chimneys.” And the Eichmann biography (David Cesarani, “Becoming Eichmann”) noted that the SS and the Gestapo were also tattooed! It was truly a regime run entirely amok.

DISTANT JOURNEY (Alfréd Radok, 1948)

“Jews and Dogs Forbidden.”
     Early Holocaust films were made by death camp survivors: from Poland, Wanda Jakubowska’s Ostatni etap (The Last Stop, 1948); from Czechoslovakia, Alfréd Radok’s Daleká cesta. Combining newsreel, melodrama, expressionism, stark realism, Radok’s film became legendary, in part because the Communists suppressed it for forty years. Films as disparate as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), Zbynek Brynych’s The Fifth Horseman Is Fear (1964) and Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982) have borrowed from it.
     At the outset of the Nazi occupation, Dr. Hana Kaufmannová is dismissed from a Prague hospital because she is Jewish. Contrary to restrictive laws, she marries in secret a Gentile. She is sent to Terezín, a transit lockup ghetto en route to Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc.; ironically, Hana is able to practice medicine there. At Terezín, 35,000 Jews died of starvation. About half of the 150,000 prisoners were transported to death camps.
     Sorrow, despair, even insanity touch Prague’s Jewish community. An ocean of the dispossessed crawls into the small confines of Terezín; a sustained overhead shot in darkness is especially trenchant. German soldiers target women and elderly men for especial cruelty. A great passage: amidst chaotic fear over the presumed building of a gas chamber, a transport of typhoid victims arrives. A car is sprayed with disinfectant. Between the two rows of victims that are carried in (away from the camera), Hana walks toward the camera as though shellshocked.
     War ends; “freedom!” Hana tears off the stigmatic Star of David from her infirmary outfit. Voiceover: Man has been victorious. As we hear these encouraging words, we see something else: Hana and her spouse as they wander, overwhelmed, through a vast site of countless graves, each one marked with a cross. The Jewish dead: Christians have appropriated some; others are unceremoniously elsewhere.