Kapo

Fourteen year old Edith is brought to a concentration camp. The camp doctor changes her identity to save her: from now on she is Nicole, convicted of an ordinary crime. To stay alive she becomes a kapo, a prisoner set over other prisoners, and the film watches what that position does to her. Gillo Pontecorvo, six years before The Battle of Algiers, made one of the first fiction films to depict the camps directly. Susan Strasberg leads, and it was nominated for the foreign language Oscar in 1961. Its actual place in film history, though, comes from a piece of criticism. In Cahiers du cinéma, in an article titled De l'abjection, Jacques Rivette attacked a single tracking shot: the moment a prisoner throws herself on the electrified wire, and the camera composes her into an artful frame. For that, Rivette wrote, the director deserved nothing but contempt. The essay is treated as the origin of the argument about how catastrophe may be filmed. Who it is for: anyone interested in the ethics of cinema. Who it is not for: viewers who will find the subject too hard.