Gillo Pontecorvo | Through the Shattered Lens

What turns someone into a collaborator?

That’s the question that is at the heart of the 1960 Italian-French film, Kapo.

The film opens in Nazi-occupied France, with 14 year-old Edith (played by 22 year-old Susan Strasberg) practicing the piano at her teacher’s house. Edith wears the yellow star on her dress and, as she finishes her lesson, her teacher instructs her to be careful returning home. Edith cheerfully states that she and her family have nothing to worry about. Edith walks home and, as the opening credits roll, we follow her as she walks through what appears to be a very robust and busy city. Other than the yellow star on Edith’s dress, there are no outward signs of the occupation in the city. However, when Edith finally reaches her neighborhood, she sees that her family and her neighbors are being rounded up the Germans.

Edith and her parents are sent to a concentration camp but get separated as soon as they arrive. Wandering around the camp, Edith meets another prisoner named Sofia (Didi Perago). Sofia takes Edith to the camp doctor. He arranges for Edith to switch identities with a non-Jewish prisoner who has just died. Edith’s new name is Nicole and her yellow star is removed and replaced by a black triangle, which designates Edith/Nicole as being “asocial.”

Edith is transferred to another concentration camp, this one in Poland. She comes to think of herself as being Nicole. When another prisoner, Terese (Emmanuelle Riva), asks her is she’s Jewish, Nicole replies that she’s not. Nicole quickly grows hardened to life in the camp and exchanges sex for food. She becomes the lover of a guard named Karl (played by future spaghetti western mainstay Gianni Garko) and is made a Kapo, a prisoner who also works as a guard. However, when Nicole then falls in love with a Russian prisoner-of-war and he asks her to help him and his comrades escape, she is forced to finally decide whether she is Nicole or whether she’s Edith.

To return to the question that started this review: What makes someone a collaborator? That’s the question that Kapo attempts to answer and it’s a question that was undoubtedly close to Director Gillo Pontecorvo’s heart. Pontecorvo was one of the most political of the post-World War II Italian filmmakers. He was born in 1919 and, as a child, saw firsthand the rise of Mussolini. As a Jew, he also experienced anti-Semitism firsthand and, in 1938, he left Italy for France. In France, he befriended Sartre and many other key members of the International Left. He was reportedly emotionally and politically moved by his friends who left France to fight on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, he joined the Italian communist party and fought in the resistance. It’s perhaps not a surprise that, in Kapo, Nicole’s chance at redemption comes about as a result of falling in love with a communist soldier.

Unfortunately, Kapo struggles to answer the question of why one would collaborate with the enemy. The main problem is that Susan Strasberg is miscast of Edith/Nicole, never convincing us that she’s a naïve teenager or a hardened collaborator. She’s also not helped by a script that continually reduces everything down to who Edith/Nicole happens to be in love with at any given point of time. It also doesn’t help that Strasberg find herself acting opposite Emmuelle Riva, Gianni Garko, and other actors who all authentic in a way that she’s not.

Kapo is more valuable as an examination of the horrors of the camps than as a character study. The film’s most powerful moment comes early on, when Edith/Nicole learns that, in the eyes of the Nazis, it’s preferable that someone be a criminal to being a Jew. In that moment, the film captures both the brutal horror and the arbitrary absurdity of prejudice. The scene is followed by another harrowing moment, in which Edith can only helplessly watch as her parents are marched to gas chambers. In those brief moments, Kapo becomes an important film. You may not remember much about Edith/Nicole but you will remember those scenes.

I should also note that, regardless of its flaws, the film does end on a powerful note, one that will leave many viewers asking how much they would be willing to sacrifice to do the right thing. Would you sacrifice your life to save hundreds of others? It’s a question that Edith/Nicole has to answer, though the film leaves it ambiguous as to whether her final decision was made by her or if it was made for her. Still, the film’s final images do stay with you.

In America, Kapo received a nomination for what was then known as the Best Foreign Film Oscar. In Europe, though, many critics criticized Pontecorvo for making a film that they felt sentimentalized the Holocaust. Stung by their criticism, Pontecorvo’s next film, which would be considered by many critics to be his masterpiece, would be the documentary-style The Battle of Algiers, one of the most resolutely anti-sentimental political films ever made.

Earlier, I criticized Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown for taking a rather timid approach to the politics of race and class. To see just how politically safe Hurry Sundown was, one need only compare it to 1969’s Burn, an Italian film that is perhaps one of the most politically radical films ever made.

Though the story told in Burn is a fictional one, it will still be familiar to anyone who has studied the history of South America. Set in the 19th century, Burn takes place on the island of Quiemada, a colony of Portugal that is largely populated with black slaves who are forced to work on sugar plantations. As the film makes clear, sugar was as economically valuable in the 19th century as oil is today. So, it really shouldn’t be surprising that, as the film opens, Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) has been sent to the island on a mission to overthrow the colonial government and replace it with one that will be friendly to British sugar companies.

Walker does this by inspiring the slaves to revolt. To serve as a figurehead leader for the revolution, he selects a porter named Jose Delores (played by Evaristo Marquez, a nonactor who was both illiterate and working as a herder when he was selected for the role and who made up for his lack of experience and training by bringing a raw authenticity to the role). Under Walker’s direction, Jose quickly becomes known as a fearsome and great leader. Along the way, the two of them develop a paternalistic relationship with Jose looking up to Walker and Walker openly taking pride in Jose’s transformation from slave to general.

When the Portuguese eventually leave the island, the British set up a corrupt puppet government. When Jose argues for more of a role in the new government, Walker explains that none of the former slaves have the education necessary to lead a country. As Jose quickly realizes, the entire revolution was actually fought to benefit the British. Walker leaves the island and Jose and the former slaves return to working on the sugar plantations. They may no longer be slaves but they’re definitely not free. (Or, as Jose puts it towards the end of the film, one cannot be given freedom. Instead, freedom has to be grabbed.)

10 years later, Jose is leading another revolution, this time against the British-backed government. Walker is sent back to the island with a new mission, to track down and defeat Jose. When Walker first arrives back at the island, he assumes that, despite his earlier betrayal, he and Jose are still friends. As quickly becomes obvious, Jose doesn’t feel the same way…

Now, I have to admit that I didn’t see Burn under the best of circumstances. Not only did I see it on TV with regular commercial interruptions for that Risperdal lawsuit but, upon doing some online research, it also became obvious that I had watched a version of the film that was heavily edited prior to its American release. 20 minutes of footage was crudely taken out of Burn before it played in American theaters. As a result, the version of Burn that I saw had a jagged and rather crude feel to it. It was obvious that important scenes had been dropped and the end result felt disjointed.

And yet, despite all of this, Burn was still a powerful and memorable film. I say this despite the fact that rigidly political films (which this one definitely is) usually tend to bore me to tears. Even in its crudely edited form, Burn was full of powerful scenes that both made a political point and also displayed enough humanity to transcend the limits of ideology. Consider the scene where, after having just learned that his revolution has accomplished nothing, Jose is hailed as a hero by his fellow revolutionaries. In a matter of minutes, Jose goes from feeling like a failure to feeling triumphant to again feeling like a failure as he realizes that their freedom is going to be short-lived. Or how about the scene where William Wallace crudely but effectively explains how the economy works by comparing a housewife to a prostitute? And finally, there’s the film’s final scene, which is one of the most powerful that I’ve ever seen.

And then there’s Brando.

As played by Marlon Brando, William Walker comes to epitomize both cynicism and self-loathing. Reportedly, director Gillo Pontecorvo wanted to portray Walker as being a much more obvious villain and Brando fought for a more ambiguous approach to the character. What’s interesting is that, by hinting that Walker does what he does despite his guilty conscience, Brando makes the character into a much more loathsome monster than he would have been if he had been played as an unrepentant villain. Brando’s best moments come towards the end of the film, when Walker struggles to understand how Jose could be willing to sacrifice himself for a greater cause.

Whenever we discuss Brando nowadays, its to talk about his eccentricities and his weight. We talk about the fact that he was known for being difficult and that he eventually reached the point where he openly boasted about no longer caring. What should be discussed is that, regardless of what he became later in his life, Marlon Brando was a great actor. A film like Burn reminds us of that fact.