Surfing late last night, I was fairly astonished to find Pontecorvo's KAPO already in progress on Turner. I'd seen this before, but only in the full screen video in English issued decades back. The TV cut was not only widescreen, it was in Italian. Since the heroine's played by an American with a Broadway background, English had seemed only 'natural' to me, the way to go. but I must say the Italo version seemed much smoother overall, a truly major film rather than an interesting near miss. My original take was that KAPO was half way the uncompromisingly bleak product of the man who went on to make BATTLE OF ALGIERS and BURN!, bracingly so, fascinatingly detached in documentary style; and half way compromised by an embrace of traditional Hollywood romantic struggle and redemption in the long last act.

That stuff still bugged me a little, but much less. I was already enthralled enough not to care. Any other viewers of this?

Two quick points of curiosity. In the opening scene, Susan Strasberg is essentially playing Anne Frank, the part she was most associated with at the time (from the Broadway production, her big stage debut, one of the most talked about performances ever). I'm sure Pontecorvo and the actress were responsible for forging this connection, all the better to set up the transformation of lovely innocent girl into shameful Camp Warden ratting on her own, doing whatever's necessary to survive. The effect is wrenching, surprising, and really well done. Susan S. can't be praised enough for her performance, totally the daughter of Lee Strasberg. Nothing against Millie Perkins, but why wasn't Susan cast for the movie role? Too real, too un-Hollywood, simply judged too old for the part by the time the film got made? (Can't be the last since Perkins was likewise b.1938. Maybe a debut equally astounding for the film version was the motivation? Millie was another mystifyingly underutilized major actress after the initial splash, likewise 'dangerous' and interestingly wayward in her lifestyle and choices).

Secondly, it''s really interesting to find future genre star Gianni (SARTANA) Garko in a major role as a non-stereotypical (but nevertheless dangerous) Nazi. As an actor, his early allegiance to Brando and Clift is evident, and he's just fine. You can see that side of him too in his earliest Spaghetti Westerns (like THOUSAND DOLLARS ON THE BLACK/BLOOD AT SUNDOWN where his hulking psycho is uber-Marlon overacting of the best kind), but he quickly lost those edges and shadows and settled into being a much smoother and lighter sort of performer (maybe his true style, but this role is nice 'proof' that he could act 'legitimately' if anyone needs it)

Haven't seen it yet (don't have cable and too poor to get the Italian DVD), but I'll use this chance to resurrect the ancient pan that Jacques Rivette made in the pages of Cahiers du cinema during the time of its release about Pontecorvo's questionable use of the tracking shot for a character's death scene with this excellent piece by Serge Daney (his response to Rivette, depiction of Holocaust and large-scale human suffering on film and in other media) here:

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/30/kapo_daney.html

EDIT: Was just re-reading about this now and forgot that this is as much an autobiography of a cinemagoer as much as it is great personal reaction on the presentation of death in cinema. Very amused to read an anecdote about Godard's video collection:

Can "Godard probably has this too" be used as a justification on why a few of us own some of these questionable titles in this subgenre? :lol:

Proof you can scruple-free condemn a film without ever seeing it ;-)

Daney, I mean. I still have to finish the piece, which IS well written and passionate, but from what I have already read, I have to question his assumptions, and Rivette's and Godard's at least at this date (this date being the date of the experience of the film seen and commented on then, and how they all might simment in the present.) How did these folks subsequently feel about Pontecorvo's and Solinas's film about Algeria (the same duo just a couple years later), about a subject none of them was yet prepared to treat, let alone come to personal terms with, so it would seem (PETIT SOLDAT is a noble halfway attempt in the direction, but that only)? Witholding the gaze, or the tracking shot, or gliding round the impentrability of it all as Resnais did, may signify decency vs. movie necrophilia, Hollywood vulgarity and all that bad stuff...but there's wilfull blindness potentially involved as well (that's how I interpret France's banning of BATTLE OF ALGIERS) as well as a politique of conscientious objectorhood, a nouvelle vagueness that makes the political strictly personal in the manner of Ingrid Bergman-era Rossellini, but more so, repudiates engaged neorealism's investigation of key events themselves.

It's far more complicated than that. For one thing Kapo's review is from a moment early in the collective evolution of the new wave folks, and of Pontecorvo's own. Moreover, the unrepresentability of the Holocaust has since become such a discussed to death topic that it's hard to approach with the passionate freshness of either Daney or Rivette...or Pontecorvo and Solinas for that matter.

KAPO is a muddled film, but deserves credit for broaching the taboo for the first time (Daney misleadingly lumps it in with 'Fascinating Fascism' films from more than a decade after), and, at least, establishing the limits of what could and couldn't be done by semi-conventional film narrative means. It's a fair assessment that it was rendered outdated by Resnais, foredoomed, but I'd rather have the attempt than just the critical assumption. And note to Rivette, et al: Just shut up already with the usual Cahiersist 'I spit on your Contemptible Film' routine! I find the rhetoric contemptible;-) Rivette probably eschews the approach now, but Jean Luc happily
provokes thus to this day, denouncing Spielberg publicly to demonstrate he holds the high moral ground.

A much better test case of all-revealing historical tracking shot, and its cinematic sustainability as method as well as pretty picture, is the one that ends Carlo Lizzani's PROCESSO A VERONA (1962). It adds humanity to the pornography of death on film...as it films the filming of a mass execution "for the historical record", a documentarians in uniform from Mussolini's LUCE film unit recording the event, footage which forms the basis for this retraced and deviated from bravura extended shot. (And those shot/filmed aren't partisans or Jews, they're fellow fascists, so no reflexive pulpy sympathy is invited or manipulated.) The fascist filmed record pointedly omits the faces of those executed. Lizzani's transcription scrupulously shadows the original documentarians, but at the moment of machine gun fire shows the other point of view, breaking the track and leaping to the other side of the victims posed away from the camera to reveal their expressions as they hit the ground. Cut to documentaristic medium long shot of lifeless bodies and fascists filming them. The End. BUT we then make another cut over the credits to the characters left out of frame the entire movie ,but just off camera, the whole time in this claustrophobic film about Mussolini's followers punishing their own as reality closes in yet remains denied: period photos of partisan insurgents -like young Lizzani- engaging the enemy (who is no conventional 'enemy-as-other', like the Nazis, but one's fellow citizens, one's own divided national self), in turn, as machine gun fire sprays the soundtrack. The effect is extremely unsettling, but not in any stock Hollywood way. It's morally rigorous. We've just spent two hours having one set of fascists humanized before our eyes in comparison to those even more contemptible than themselves (and these wolfish hardline party bureaucrats come to seem in turn the deluded dupes and stooges of their in absentia Duce, himself Adolf Hitler's fool - the regress of evil traced to its source and then projecting outwards to swallow whole nations in culpability and tragedy - such is Lizzani's itinerary in this Viaggio in Italia), with that hallucinatory rat-a-tat-tat interjecting every few minutes. This is the sound of death foretold during the agonizingly protracted farce of a show trial as ringing in the ears of those enduring it. To hear that sound-of-executioners suddenly turned against the executioners at the very, very end is not hollowly or easily-ironically triumphant in the least. It's disorienting and sobering, yet another wrenching displacement in perspective via the very sophisticated Eisensteinian montage turned to Brechtian distancing ends that Lizzani favors. It's also liberating and just, if awfully so, as the partisans were, striking with theinevitability of final judgement when the farce is played out at last. And yet...and yet...the sound of mass execution in the service of historical legend has become tainted for us through the enemy's use of it as demonstrated in this movie. And the last judgement hasn't proven the end of it all, at all, and Lizzani does nothing to assist us in making us feel cosy via closure. Instead, he seemingly revels in reminding us how essentially distanced we are from what he's showing us in such intimist fashion. This is conventional historical legend turned inside out, shown from the point of view of the losers, cruelly, dispassionately but not inhumanely, truthfully, and with mysterious urgency...living memory of these things is slipping
away, and time for us complacent folk may in turn be running out.

Lizzani was there, saw it all, saw the history in great danger of being officially forgotten under the Christian Democratic regime just as Mussolini had earlier willed it be officially misremembered for the good of the country, and its collective consciousnness/troubled conscience. In a series of films over decades, the director scrupulously tried to reconstruct all the dramas from all perspectives of the last days of his war. Tracking shots used as needed, but never necrophilically or melodramatically. This is neorealism in the context of a seemingly conventional narrative deployed with all the rightness of touch, and high moral purpose that attackers of KAPO were calling for. Maybe the Camps can't be shown, but what about the rest of the war, or other wars since and now? KAPO-criticism doesn't address these issues, but begs them, it seems to me.

PS: I notice that Rivette didn't condemn the movie per se, but the cameraman (don't shoot the cameraman?). And I know this is a memoir not a critique (and by someone who claims to share Pontecorvo's basic political outlook, as he writes in another context). Nonetheless, that remembered quote of Rivette and my own memory of Godard's moralizing about tracking shots over the years along with his mixed political history on film (current history so often filtered and seemingly experienced purely through his engagement with other films and works of art; I'm being a bit unfair, I admit, but only a bit) had to prompt my comments. I have such a strong love-hate for the crew Daney evokes, the kind only closest family induces in me otherwise. I'd be very interested to see the current Cahiers gang cast a retrospective glance back at their illustrious predecessors and listen in on the roundtable debate (which used to be standard there every five years or so) of the lasting value of their legacy as cinema politicians dictating the rules so many of us tried to live by for shorter or longer spells.

I prefer STATE OF SIEGE to KAPO, but look forward to DVD releases of both. Three of my favorite filmmakers were from the anti-fascist school: Pontecorvo, Zurlini, and (a non Italian) Costa-Gavras. All had similar cinematic statements throughout their collective bodies of work. Lizzani's is a roster I very much want to explore further.
What other Rivette is there on DVD?

On a related note, just read on A Film By discussion group where, coincidentally, they are having a discussion of Rivette's sweeping dismissals on films and directors as well. The man hasn't changed much as seen from this recent interview here where he gave brief capsule movie reviews that alternate from insightful, acidly funny and sharp, and plain weird:

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/16/rivette.html

Some juicy ones:

On James Cameron regarding TITANIC:

John Woo and FACE/OFF:

Michael Haneke and FUNNY GAMES:

:rolleyes:

Godard, of course, said wackier things than this (re: NY Times interview). In segment 2(a) of HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA I've watched tonight, in a discussion with Daney (who didn't have any problem watching a lot of TV and wrote some major pieces on it) on TV Godard talks about how TV, unlike film, projects on the audience, then cut to a listing of major European TV networks (eg. TF1, RAI) then to the continuation of the discussion (sound only) on the evils of TV playing under extracts from SALO. He has an interesting point but that's just excessive and heavy-handed... :blink:

There's a good number of Rivette DVD's that are out. In R1, there's JOAN THE MAID, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, GANG OF FOUR, SECRET DEFENCE, VA SAVOIR (theatrical version), and LA BELLE NOISEUSE. From France R2, there's a box set of 6 movies made up of L'AMOUR PAR TERRE, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, GANG OF FOUR, SECRET DEFENCE, LA BELLE NOISEUSE, and HUAT BAS FRAGILE plus an extra DVD of interviews with Rivette and cast and crew and his segment in LUMIERE AND COMPANY; his latest STORY OF MARIE AND JULIEN (no subtitles, French or otherwise; Artifical Eye in UK is releasing this soon); and VA SAVOIR (longer version).

Thanks Dave, that link and those quotes put a lot of things about Rivette -the off the cuff reviewer- in perspective.

Funny thing is, I share most of his opinions, and I like how he expresses them! Albeit, only in an "off the record" sort of way. (I also enjoy his films, more or less.)

My personal code is that one has to balance full blast honesty and a certain circumspectness when expressing oneself in print, realizing that a fair number of readers may take yours as the last word on the subject, and not bother to see the movie...as Daney did('nt do) after absaorbing Rivette's comment about KAPO. What's worse, Rivette's devil may care brand of authority apparently made a definitive impression, casting doctrinaire dismissal based on a guru's say so into an epiphany for Daney, a core memory that defined his subsequent critical course, his way of looking at the world generally, the turning point. That's the only bit that really irritated me, the sticking point. I think Rivette, at least back then, was complicitous in the 'taking of Rivette too seriously' line.. The casting of contempt in those days was a Sartre-ian principle of taking a do-or-die/with-us-or-against-us stand on every issue of the day, whether or not one really had thought it through. Casual opinions took on 'moral weight'. That's one thing when tyrants and quislings, and which side one's on in vital crises, are involved. But it's silly or noxious in movie opinionizing if treated too seriously. The moral weight can become cosmetic and superficial, to be admired like developed muscles on body builders, just showing off...or turned to bullying the undecided by throwing one's weight around, backed up by one's critical gang.

I could say an evil thing or two about LA BELLE NOISEUSE, but I can't find the necessary devil icon on the roster here to signal my dastardly intent...so I'll just smile and think nice thoughts instead ;)