Alain Resnais

The present and the past co-exist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback.

- Alain Resnais (1922 - 2014)

Kapo (1959) - Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

 

Once in a while I see a film that is deeply unsettling. In the case of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1959 film called Kapo, I am not the first nor the last that will be troubled by it. In fact, in order to be respectful for the subject matter, I refrain from posting any screenshots from the film. I didn't feel right about searching through the film for artistic screen shots considering the subject matter. Kapo is about the Holocaust and is one of the first fictional films to deal with the subject in its entirety. There were a few films prior to it that dealt with parts of it, such as 1948’s The Search. In 1955, Alain Resnais made the documentary, Night and Fog which chillingly detailed the lasting horror of the event. In some circles, Night and Fog is the final and last word on the subject. In 1959, only 14 years after the Holocaust, two films would emerge in the same year. One was The Diary of Anne Frank, of course based on Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and also on the dramatic stage play that appeared on Broadway in 1955. Pontecorvo’s film was an original work, with a screenplay written by Pontecorvo, who was Jewish, and Franco Solinas. In doing some research after watching the film, it turns out that Kapo is on the short list of the most divisive and troubling films in the history of cinema, not just for what's in it, but for what it started.

Pontecorvo brought his love of Italian neo-realism, and Rossellini in particular to Kapo, a film that concerns 14 year-old Edith (played by Susan Strasberg fresh from her stint on Broadway as Anne Frank), who is transported with her Jewish family from Paris to Auschwitz. Through some coincidences and unique occurrences, she obtains an alternate identity there and takes the name and number of a recently dead prisoner. She is now Nichole, a non-Jew with a criminal past. She gets sent to a work camp because of these events. While there, she does everything she can to stay alive, as a character suggests to her, but begins to break down morally and lose her dignity, as others warn her not to. Kapo concerns a very unique type of story that actually occurred throughout the Nazi concentration and work camps and one which I was never aware of until seeing the film. A Kapo was an inmate who was given a job by the SS to be barrack supervisor or warden and who dished out punishment to their fellow prisoners to keep them in line. A Kapo was treated better than most prisoners and had more access to food and other items of need. There are numerous cases following WWII in which Kapos were indeed charged with war crimes, much like the Nazis. In the film, Nichole, after selling her body and soul to achieve warmth and food, is offered the job of Kapo. She takes it.

What the film attempted to do, tell a fictional story replete with melodrama and martyrdom, was considered objectful in the worst sense. Famously, Jacques Rivette of The Cahiers du Cinema renounced the film wholeheartedly in an essay based on one specific scene. There’s a scene with a brief tracking shot where a woman named Terese (played brilliantly by Emmanuelle Riva) throws herself on the electrified barbed wire. Rivette wrote: "Look however in Kapo, the shot where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body - carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing - this man is worthy of the most profound contempt".

Famously French Critic Serge Daney was so in agreement with this paragraph at age 17 that he decided to become a film critic. Later in life, he wrote a fascinating essay on Rivette, Kapo (which he never even saw!!!) among other things regarding the limitations that art should take. He also highlights a scene in the well-known Rossellini film, Rome, Open City (1945). There’s a famous scene where Ana Magnani is gunned down in the street and the camera is at a particular angle where you can see her garters and underskirt as she lies there dead. Daney says regarding this scene: “(Rossellini) was hitting “below the belt”, but in such a new way that it would take years to understand towards which abyss it was taking us.” Both Rivette and Daney of course are referring to the "moral irresponsibility" of artistically framing up something that could or should be considered un-filmable, unless one wants to be considered sadistic or voyeuristic. Only recently, Quentin Tarantino was taken to task for his Inglorious Basterds (2009) both panned and praised, which contained highly objectionable material to some, regarding revenge related to Nazi atrocities. I think Kapo works on a similar but far more benign type of level, as I was less troubled with the dramatization and artistic sensibilities of the subject matter, and more over the morally troublesome portrayal of a Jew as the main antogonist of the film. Other Nazis in the film are at worst, faceless and at best, docile. Nichole is by far the perpetuity of evil in the way that she has turned into an animal, one which is capable of selling out her fellow prisoners in order to live. I struggled with this moral conundrum during the film and still do. This film stares you in the face and presents the viewer with a near unimaginable horror - that of the persecuted becoming the persecutor. I cannot deny that the film contains both potential to deeply move and infuriate. It’s both a masterpiece and a failed examination depending on your view. I don’t think it’s possible though to not be moved or troubled by it. It will definitely bring out a reaction to everyone who sees it. Pontecorvo would take the criticism from this film into his next film, The Battle of Algiers (1966), which is rightly praised for its hard-line, unsentimental look at the Algerian War.

I realize though, that I’ve spent an entire essay talking about a film that I cannot wholly recommend regarding its virtues. What I can say for sure, is that it is a landmark kind of film, one which film-viewers must see to determine what side of the argument they fall on. Is this melodramatic and objectionable exploitation or is it a vital and important work with commentary on one of the darkest periods mankind has ever known? For Pontecorvo, although he fails at times to get through the story without contrivances, he succeeds in telling an effective and engaging story that did occur in forms just like it. Morally troubling as it may be, Kapos existed. Their stories of the persecuted becoming the persecutors are some of the most morally difficult that I can think of. Perhaps this film’s greatest legacy then is telling a story that no one else has dared to tell ever since, for better or worse. I can't even imagine if someone tried to make this film today what untold numbers of people would put forth an outcry. I'm not sure any film on the Holocaust will ever be made without severe critiquing though. For me, the film’s unique place in history, its divisiveness and important centrality in the determination of whether art should bear a responsibility, make it essential.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - Directed by Alain Resnais

I’ve never been comfortable with any associations that were made between Alain Resnais and The French New Wave movement. Although his most popular films came out at the same time as Godard and Truffaut were taking off with Breathless (1960) and The 400 Blows (1959) respectively, the connection had to have been based on his being French and making innovative films. Other than that, his films share little in common with the movement. Night and Fog (1955) was Resnais’ coming out party, a painfully moving documentary on the Holocaust, filmed at Auschwitz, it was a haunting piece on the lingering aftershocks that such a horror can leave. Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) was a beautiful love story between a Japanese man and a French woman who seem to be connected cosmically through both personally tragic moments, and larger scale horrors, like the bomb on Hiroshima. Somehow Resnais was able to make the connection between past and present in both of those films in ways that are original. I’ve always felt Resnais had more of a kinship in a way with Jean Cocteau, the surrealist director of Blood of a Poet (1930) and Beauty and the Beast (1946). The way Cocteau played with mirrors and time and space are reflective of what Resnais does with his masterwork, Last Year at Marienbad.

Though not as tragic or humanely compelling as his previously mentioned works, Marienbad is one of cinema’s great enigmatic puzzles. It’s a rule-breaking kind of film that was structurally innovative then and in its own way, still compels, exasperates, and inspires deep reflection of what film can be. Resnais’s film opens with a cryptic repeated voiceover as we’re introduced to a grand and stately hotel through tracking shots down the halls, replete with visions of the gilded and artful ceilings. There is almost no one seemingly occupying the place. After several minutes of this, we see people. We have no idea who they are or what their purpose is but they are watching a play of sorts. It's the presence of a noticeably artificial stage play presented to the audience that should be a clue to us as we watch Last Year at Marienbad. What we are about to see cannot be trusted. 

We’re introduced to a woman, “A” (Delphine Seyrig), a man “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi), and another man “M” (Sacha Pitoeff). We witness scene after scene of questions that X asks to A, exchanges of cryptic dialogue, moments between them that may have happened last year or may have not, remembered as if they just occurred a moment before, or didn’t at all. Then of course, M comes into the picture and throws the whole thing for a loop, creating a love triangle perhaps. Resnais directly plays with our consciousness of time in that he cuts directly from one moment that may have been to another moment that either may be, or may have been as well. There’s little delineation between what happened, what is happening, or what might have happened. It appears that M is married to A and their interaction reflects a jealous husband suspecting a cheating wife. My question is whether A knows X at all from any previous interaction. Sometimes it appears like they are remembering their happenings from one year ago, and at other times we think they’re meeting for the first time.

Of course the whole thing could also be interpreted as a grand ghost story. More than once, there are indications that one or two of the characters might be dead and that we are witnessing their ghostly interactions. Although there are numerous other people filling the old hotel, they feel distant from the action as if they are wandering aimlessly, filling up the scenery but not really there. Adding to the haunted house quality would be the weird/ghoulish organ music composed by Francis Seyrig, played nearly constantly over the soundtrack. Resnais’s film holds a kinship with Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), where the reality of what we see cannot be trusted. Also several more recent films play with reality in its many forms like this: Shutter Island (2010), Inception (2010), and several of David Lynch’s films like Mulholland Drive (2001). Last Year at Marienbad still feels innovative and unique though because of its never ending ability to puzzle us and unlike the films I mentioned, it doesn't really tip its hand, as far as I can tell, leaving the viewer to bask gloriously in the mystery even after the film is over. It's a cold and distant film emotionally, but its artful and carefully composed shots, the smooth pans of the camera through the glorious hotel, the labyrinthine structure, and the haunting ambiguity are a testament to Resnais’s unique vision, making it an art-house classic that continues to beguile us.