Enclosure

In a Nazi concentration camp two prisoners are shut into a small fenced enclosure. One is Karl, a German political prisoner, the other David, a Jewish watchmaker. The arrangement is plain: only one of them will leave alive. The film tells this not as a work of suspense but as a study of setting people against one another as a method; the real matter is not which of the two will win but what those who devised the game are doing. The account rests on the talk between the two men and on waiting, and shows almost nothing outside. That it compresses the truth of the camp into a single enclosure is the hardest part of the film. Jean Negroni appears in Armand Gatti’s ninety nine minute French film, completed in 1961.