My journey with Gillo Pontecorvo started with The Battle of Algiers and continued with Queimada. Now I finally have the pleasure of going back to the movie that first cemented his position as one of the best directors ever, Kapo. Once again he's assisted by the great European screenwriter Franco Solinas, a man who has given so much to world cinema and yet remains forgotten.
Kapo is not a movie about revolutions; it's perhaps Pontecorvo's most traditional and intimate movie since it doesn't concern the sweeping history of a country or conflicts between cultures. It simply follows Edith, a Jewish girl returning home after a piano lesson. She arrives just in time to be taken, with her family, by the SS. Through luck, a doctor creates a new, non-Jewish, identity, for her. Her family is sent to Auschwitz, but she goes to a labour camp, where she may survive.
What follows is a slow transformation from a shy, innocent girl into a ruthless woman who'll do anything to survive. Her chance comes when she becomes a Kapo, or one of the inmates in charge of the other inmates. She's well fed, well clothed, she has some respect from the German soldiers and inspires terror in the other women. Susan Strasberg becomes the character, always captivating even when she's ruthless. She reminds me of Giancarlo Giannini in that other masterpiece about concentration camp prisoners, Pasqualino Settebellezze.
This is a very bleak Holocaust movie because it paints a picture of the inmates that may leave some people uncomfortable. This is not Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful or The Pianist, all hard movies, but in which we see the people helping each other in a good spirit of comradeship. The reality of Kapo resembles more that of Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, or Tadeusz Borowski's We Were in Auschwitz, objective, emotionless memoirs about what people would do to survive every day in a concentration camp, of how low they'd go in their degradation, of how their will to survive made them forget morality and decency.
Although a bit dated, Kapo remains a great study of the worst side of human nature. The camp may seem a bit unrealistic nowadays as well as a love story that develops within its electric fences, but back then the concentration world wasn't as well studied as it is today. What remains is really a powerful story directed with craft and compassion.
Kapo is not a movie about revolutions; it's perhaps Pontecorvo's most traditional and intimate movie since it doesn't concern the sweeping history of a country or conflicts between cultures. It simply follows Edith, a Jewish girl returning home after a piano lesson. She arrives just in time to be taken, with her family, by the SS. Through luck, a doctor creates a new, non-Jewish, identity, for her. Her family is sent to Auschwitz, but she goes to a labour camp, where she may survive.
What follows is a slow transformation from a shy, innocent girl into a ruthless woman who'll do anything to survive. Her chance comes when she becomes a Kapo, or one of the inmates in charge of the other inmates. She's well fed, well clothed, she has some respect from the German soldiers and inspires terror in the other women. Susan Strasberg becomes the character, always captivating even when she's ruthless. She reminds me of Giancarlo Giannini in that other masterpiece about concentration camp prisoners, Pasqualino Settebellezze.
This is a very bleak Holocaust movie because it paints a picture of the inmates that may leave some people uncomfortable. This is not Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful or The Pianist, all hard movies, but in which we see the people helping each other in a good spirit of comradeship. The reality of Kapo resembles more that of Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, or Tadeusz Borowski's We Were in Auschwitz, objective, emotionless memoirs about what people would do to survive every day in a concentration camp, of how low they'd go in their degradation, of how their will to survive made them forget morality and decency.
Although a bit dated, Kapo remains a great study of the worst side of human nature. The camp may seem a bit unrealistic nowadays as well as a love story that develops within its electric fences, but back then the concentration world wasn't as well studied as it is today. What remains is really a powerful story directed with craft and compassion.