PASSENGER, Andrzej Munk, 1961-3 Poland
The final film of young Polish director of 'Bad Luck' (1960), a black comedy in which the little grey man of East European literature blunders through a series of misfortunes, in which he is mistaken for a Jew because of the shape of his nose, only to end up working as a camp for the German occupiers. In 'Passenger' (Pasazerka, 1963)) the Jews have been mistaken for people who deserve to die, and the camp guard is a woman, icily Aryan and Jodie Fosterish, called Liza.
The film contains at least one of the great sequences in post-war European cinema: the children descending the steps into the sealed chamber, accompanied by fat white-wimpled matrons and watched by Aleksandra Slaska (playing Liza, a minor SS supervisor). She stands on the far side of the wire 'unable to do anything' to prevent the massacre. Meanwhile a fellow guard pours white powder into the ventilation-shaft on the roof, rather ineptly, rather clumsily, haplessly doing his job...
In Auschwitz we are told, it is the sound of the wires singing at night which created perpetual terror in the inmates. We hear that sound in the accompanying documentary 'Last Pictures' (also on this admirable disk set from Second Run DVD, the UK releasing house now in the front rank of world distributors). What is Liza thinking as she stands there watching the queue of children descending into the charnel-house? What might she be thinking as she watches this? More importantly (for Liza is of course Slaska, an actor) is what the image prompts the viewer to be thinking, to experience, to imagine. Are we tempted by the questionable pleasures of watching such a film to empathise with the most unsympathetic people in the modern history, those who administered the death-camps of eastern Poland in the early 1940's, but did so with a kind of - dare we say? - conscience. The camera holds, and holds, until Liza is called away. She of course does nothing to stop the holocaust. The plot includes a segment (the film is unfinished and made up of surviving sections and portmanteau of stills put together by Munk's collaborator Witold Lesiewicz) wherein she does something to save Marta (a woman who fascinates her) from certain death, and to save a baby found in a pram after dozens of other babies had been incinerated. Then Liza is transferred and collects her bicycle, washes her hands of the whole fiasco, and walks away. Because she can.
Utterly chilling, and a marvellous artefact both from its period, the early sixties Polish new wave (evoked in interviews with Polanski in the accompanying doco) and from the 'holocaust era', a relatively early attempt to create art after Auschwitz.
Like Vigo, who left two films and two shorts, but an enduring reputation, Munk did so little (by comparison with the prolific and brilliant Polanski - five full-length features), but left a considerable mark as the best film-author of the Polish new wave. This kind of film-art it is tempting to put in the top drawer of all genres and styles for the effect it has on the viewer's mind is supremely elevating and humbling at once, while the helpless gallows-humour seems likely to be more appropriate in the end than melodrama or horror for treating this terrible subject.