pasazerka (w&d andrzej munk, d. witold lesiewicz, w. zofia posmysz)

Munk died in a road accident whilst making this unfinished film, at the age of 40. The narrative develops around Liza a female former SS guard at Auschwitz, returning to Europe aboard a cruise ship from the Americas. A passenger boards who she recognises: Marta, a prisoner who she had 'adopted' as her assistant at the camp, before being transferred to Berlin. She has assumed that Marta was dead, and that the secrets Marta holds about her past had gone with her. Their relationship is also affected by the love that Marta had for a fellow prisoner. Theirs was a love which transcended their dreadful circumstances and Liza was both fascinated and jealous.

The complexity of this relationship is posited against the backdrop of the horrors of Auschwitz. Munk, (of jewish descent, who managed to escape during the war), filmed in Auschwitz itself. The realism is overwhelming, as is the horror. At one point, a stream of children file, smiling, oblivious, into a hut. One girl even stops to pet the guard's Alsatian. Meanwhile, on the roof, a soldier dons a gas mask and drops Zyklon B into cavities. The cruelty is pervasive, sometimes foregrounded, but even when not, it is always occurring, at the edge of the screen. Added to which, the mud, the darkness, the sickness, the hopelessness, is laid out by Munk, through the eyes of the guard. Glazer chose to stay on the other side of the wall. Munk takes us inside Auschwitz, with its barbarism and its string quartets.

The film is unfinished, with his contemporaries supplying a voiceover and including stills from the material on the cruise ship which couldn't be coherently edited together. This blog exists in part to document films that have slipped under the radar, names that should be revered but are not. I have the luck to live near Cinemateca, where it's possible to stumble over films that one would otherwise never get to see. The Passenger is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking and perhaps the first and last time that a fictional movie about the holocaust has ever got as close to capturing something of its reality.