Kapo (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Kapo |
| Original title | Kapò |
| Country of production | Italy , France |
| original language |
Italian English German |
| Publishing year | 1960 |
| length | 118 (original version), 99 (German version) minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Gillo Pontecorvo |
| script |
Franco Solinas Gillo Pontecorvo |
| production |
Franco Cristaldi Moris Ergas |
| music | Carlo Rustichelli |
| camera | Aleksandar Sekulovic |
| cut | Roberto Cinquini |
| occupation | |
and Paola Pitagora , Dragomir Felba , Bruno Scipioni , Annabella Besi , Graziella Galvani , Eleonora Bellinzaghi | |
Kapo is an Italian-French Holocaust film drama from 1960 directed by Gillo Pontecorvo with Susan Strasberg in the lead role.
action
Paris, at the time of the German occupation of France in World War II .
The 14-year-old Jew Edith is arrested together with her parents and deported to a Nazi concentration camp. Right at the beginning, the pretty girl is separated from her father and mother. An elderly, also imprisoned doctor, who - he points to the red triangle attached to the prisoner's clothing - is incarcerated as a "political" person, leads them into his meager treatment room. The man points out to Edith the special features of the camp and the many dangers that lurk here. In the process he cuts off Edith's beautiful, long, black hair, hands her the prisoner clothes and tattoos the prisoner number on her left forearm. Now Edith is no longer a person, just a number: 10099. As if in shock, Edith endures everything. When she heard the noise coming from outside into the doctor's room, she went to the window and had to see naked people, small children and old men, from German concentration camp guards shouting “Weiter, weiter!” And “Judenpack verfluchtes, you Bastard! ”Be driven across the yard. Among these people, Edith recognizes her equally naked, freezing parents who are running towards their death. Desperate, she keeps screaming for them through the closed window pane.
The doctor turns out to be very lucky for Edith in her misfortune. A non-Jewish prisoner, a certain Nicole Niepas, has just passed away. The doctor tells Edith that she has to remember this name. Because from now on she is Nicole. This, he makes it clear to the disturbed Edith, is her only chance of survival in this place of horror and murder. It does not have to bear the symbol of a Jewish concentration camp prisoner, but only the black triangle that "distinguishes" the criminals. “As a criminal,” the doctor explains, one is still doing much better here in the camp than a Jew. Edith alias Nicole quickly understands the consequences this means for her. She too will be beaten and mistreated in the future, and hunger will be her constant companion. She too will have to secretly get food for this reason and will therefore be viewed with suspicion by fellow inmates. But she doesn't have to fear gassing . Edith even found a confidante in the inmate Terese, who was also stigmatized with the black triangle.
Edith alias Nicole now starts howling with the wolves in order to ensure their survival. She begins to prostitute herself and enters into a liaison with a German officer named Karl. And she rises to a subordinate camp overseer, a so-called Kapo. One day things will begin to change decisively for her. Numerous Soviet prisoners of war were driven into the men's camp in a long march. Among them is the handsome Sascha. When the two of them get to know each other by chance, it is over for them. Trapped in the deeply inhumane warehouse hell, both begin to develop deep feelings for each other. Under the most difficult of circumstances, they manage to remove themselves from the field of vision of their guardians and to create short, tender moments of private happiness in the utmost secrecy.
Sascha makes it clear to Nicole that he and some of his fellow prisoners want to risk a large-scale escape attempt. Nicole soon realizes that she cannot continue as before, that she too has to take a position. Meanwhile, in a fit of great despair, her fellow prisoner Terese, who has become a friend, rushes into the barbed wire fence that surrounds the camp, which is under high voltage and kills herself. When the attempt to break out occurs, shots are fired and numerous prisoners die in the hail of bullets from the SS guards. A few actually manage to escape. Nicole, who wants to switch off the electric fence from the power supply, is also hit by a bullet the moment she has decided on the right side. Karl rushes to her and hears the dying woman say the last words of the Jewish prayer Shema Yisrael , with which Nicole becomes Edith again and she finally acknowledges her Jewish identity again.
Production notes, backgrounds, interesting facts
Mostly shot in Yugoslavia in 1959 , Kapo was premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 7, 1960. The mass start was on September 29 of the same year. The film opened in Germany on April 14, 1961.
The film constructions come from Piero Gherardi .
A Kapo was a henchman who was subordinate to the SS or the camp management of a National Socialist concentration camp and who was responsible for supervising other concentration camp prisoners, among other things.
After her portrayal of Anne Frank , who she played in the theatrical version of The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway from October 1955 to June 1957 , Edith in Kapo was the second Jewish character from the time of the Holocaust to be found within Susan Strasberg briefly embodied.
Kapo was in 1961 nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language film . The film won the Laceno d'Oro at the Avellino Neorealism Film Festival in 1961. In the same year Susan Strasberg was named Best Actress at the Mar del Plata Film Festival .
Reception and controversy
The film has been extremely controversial since its presentation. The sharply formulated criticism of Pontecorvo's French colleague Jacques Rivette , which he formulated in the June 1961 issue of Cahiers du cinéma , issue 120, became famous. In his essay De l'abjection (in German: “About the wickedness” or “From the infamy”), Rivette spoke, referring explicitly to a single scene in which the concentration camp prisoner played by Emmanuelle Riva was suicidal throws into the electrically charged barbed wire fence of the camp, of "voyeurism" and "pornography".
For Rivette in 1961 a horror like that of the Holocaust appeared quintessentially unsuitable for a feature film, and the director Pontecorvo assumed that the horrific death was aesthetically aestheticized by means of special camera angles - Emmanuelle Riva, taken from a frog's perspective, with her hand outstretched at the moment of death; a close-up captured by the camera moving forward, while the background is almost blurred - simply as a cinematic profanity to achieve a dramatic effect. Rivette found that Pontecorvo's staging deserved contempt and, moreover, questioned the moral values and the general ethical awareness of the Italian colleague.
The renowned film critic Serge Daney responded three decades later to Rivette's tough polemic with his own considerations. In the specialist journal Trafic , which he founded , he took up the controversy about the hotly debated tracking shot scene at the electric fence in the article Le traveling de Kapo in issue no. 4 from autumn 1992.
The lexicon of international film writes: "The woven love story with a Soviet prisoner tarnishes the credible overall picture of the hauntingly designed film."
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cahiers du cinéma, issue 120 from June 1961 (French)
- ↑ Ángel Quintana: The film-maker's ethic in the face of the inevidence of the times ( Memento of the original from January 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Serge Daney: Le traveling de Kapo
- ↑ Kapo in the Lexicon of International Films , accessed on January 5, 2014.
Web links
- Kapo in the Internet Movie Database (English)