“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.
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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.
Tags: east european cinema
This entry was posted on October 14, 2007 at 5:50 am and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.