Kapò
Encyclopedia
Kapò is an Italian film about the Holocaust directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
Gillo Pontecorvo
Gillo Pontecorvo was an Italian filmmaker. He worked as a film director for more than a decade before his best known film La battaglia di Algeri was released...

 in 1959. It was nominated for the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film. It was an Italian-French co-production filmed in Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....

.

Plot

Naive fourteen-year-old Edith (Susan Strasberg
Susan Strasberg
Susan Elizabeth Strasberg was an American film and stage actress.-Background and career:Strasberg was born in New York City, New York, the daughter of theatre director and drama coach Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio and former actress Paula Strasberg...

) and her Jewish parents are sent to a concentration camp, where the latter are killed. Sofia (Didi Perego
Didi Perego
Didi Perego was a statuesque actress who appeared in over 80 films and television shows. She made her debut in 1959's Death of a Friend and followed it up in the same year with perhaps her best-known performance, as Sofia in Kapò for which she won the Silver Ribbon for Best Supporting Actress...

), an older, political prisoner, and a kindly camp doctor save her from a similar fate by giving her a new, non-Jewish identity, that of the newly dead Nichole Niepas.

As time goes by, she becomes more hardened to the brutal life. She first sells her body to a German guard in return for food; she becomes fond of another guard, Karl (Gianni Garko
Gianni Garko
Gianni Garko is an Italian actor who found much fame as a leading man in Spaghetti Westerns...

). The fraternization helps her become a kapo
Kapo (concentration camp)
A kapo was a prisoner who worked inside German Nazi concentration camps during World War II in any of certain lower administrative positions. The official Nazi word was Funktionshäftling, or "prisoner functionary", but the Nazis commonly referred to them as kapos.- Etymology :The origin of "kapo"...

, one of those put in charge of the other prisoners. She thrives while the idealistic Sofia grows steadily weaker.

When she falls in love with Sascha (Laurent Terzieff
Laurent Terzieff
Laurent Terzieff was a French actor.- Biography :Laurent Terzieff was the son of a plastician and of Jean Terzieff, a Russian sculptor who emigrated to France during the First World War. The original surname of his family was Čemerzin.The spectacle of the bombardments had a dramatic effect on...

), a Russian prisoner of war
Prisoner of war
A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...

, Edith is persuaded to play a crucial role in a mass escape, turning off the power. Most of the would-be escapees are killed, but some get away. Edith is not one of them. As she lies dying, she tells Karl, "They screwed us over, Karl, they screwed us both over."

Cast

  • Susan Strasberg
    Susan Strasberg
    Susan Elizabeth Strasberg was an American film and stage actress.-Background and career:Strasberg was born in New York City, New York, the daughter of theatre director and drama coach Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio and former actress Paula Strasberg...

     as Edith, alias Nicole Niepas
  • Laurent Terzieff
    Laurent Terzieff
    Laurent Terzieff was a French actor.- Biography :Laurent Terzieff was the son of a plastician and of Jean Terzieff, a Russian sculptor who emigrated to France during the First World War. The original surname of his family was Čemerzin.The spectacle of the bombardments had a dramatic effect on...

     as Sascha
  • Emmanuelle Riva
    Emmanuelle Riva
    Emmanuelle Riva is a French actress.Riva started her acting career on the Paris stage after having worked as a seamstress...

     as Terese
  • Didi Perego
    Didi Perego
    Didi Perego was a statuesque actress who appeared in over 80 films and television shows. She made her debut in 1959's Death of a Friend and followed it up in the same year with perhaps her best-known performance, as Sofia in Kapò for which she won the Silver Ribbon for Best Supporting Actress...

     as Sofia
  • Gianni Garko
    Gianni Garko
    Gianni Garko is an Italian actor who found much fame as a leading man in Spaghetti Westerns...

     as Karl, German Soldier
  • Annabella Besi
  • Graziella Galvani
  • Paola Pitagora
    Paola Pitagora
    Paola Pitagora is an Italian film actress. She has appeared in 50 films since 1959.She was born in Parma, Italy.-Selected filmography:* Fists in the Pocket * In Search of Gregory * Revolver...


Controversy

From the Wall Street Journal article, "Hollywood's Nazi Revisionism", by Bernard-Henri Lévy
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French public intellectual, philosopher and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" movement in 1976.-Early life:...

, translated by Janet Lizop:
The Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo earned "the deepest contempt" of French director Jacques Rivette
Jacques Rivette
Jacques Rivette is a French film director. His most well known films include Celine and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and the cult film Out 1....

 in an article in Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...

 nearly 50 years ago for a scarcely more insistent shot in the 1959 film "Kapo." The shot was of the raised hand of actress Emmanuelle Riva
Emmanuelle Riva
Emmanuelle Riva is a French actress.Riva started her acting career on the Paris stage after having worked as a seamstress...

, her character Terese electrocuted on the barbed wire of the concentration camp from which she was trying to escape. The criticism hung over Pontecorvo until his dying day. He was ostracized, almost cursed, for a shot, just one.

Lévy contrasts this reaction to one shot with the garish exploitation of Nazi history in 2009's Inglourious Basterds and 2010's Shutter Island.

See also


External links

Column « De l'Abjection » by Jacques Rivette (1961) devoted to Pontecorvo's Kapo, L'oBservatoire site.
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