MovieChat Forums > Kapò (1960) Discussion > so fake...

so fake...

posted 17 years ago by jean-marc-5
6 replies | jump to latest

For some reason, I almost never found this story believable... The music, the love story... I don't think people in the camps had so much free time. The blocks seems almost cosy at some stage with people reading, dancing... ! It all seems too superficial, corny. What Terzieff is doing there??? I can't believe also this movie was selected as one of the best foreign ones... Everything is happening too quickly, and you don't give the thruth of a character just by showing some glamourous and humidified eyes.

An interesting comment I think about the "aesthetics" of this movie: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/30/kapo_daney.html

Nothing in this movie as good as "Nuit et brouillard" or "Schindler's list".

[–] The_Dying_Flutchman 16 years ago

I disagree with one fatal flaw in yer arguement: the tap dancing scenes in this were far better than Schindler, but not as good as "Chateau of Damaged Livers".

Nothing is more beautiful than nothing.

[–] Eumenides_0 15 years ago

Don't forget Kapo got made just fifteen years after the war ended. There didn't yet exist the Holocaust industry that today has left no topic untouched. Spielberg had fifty years of historical research to help him make his movie realistic.

Still, memoirs by survivors like Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski shows Kapo's savage amoral world in which it was each man for himself, is more realistic than the kind, altruistic network of jews helping each other survive in camps, that Schindler's List shows.

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

[–] Dances_with_Weasels 15 years ago

Good points. Very well said.

Are you going to pull those pistols or whistle "Dixie"?

[–] aaronk-2 14 years ago

Preach

[–] Kammurabi 11 years ago

Did you even watch this film?
This was far more brutally straightforward and realistic than Schindler's List.
There is also no one with Susan Strasberg's quality in Schindler's List.
All of the points you make against Kapo are elements which could be said to also exist in Schindler's List. Music, love story, where is the time to carry on dramas, etc.
The truth of character is everywhere in this film. It simply isn't beaten about your head like a hammer.

I say these things as an unbiased observer who has a copy of both in my collection.

.

[–] PillowRock 10 years ago

The blocks seems almost cosy at some stage with people reading, dancing...

That was not in the blocks. It was that quarters of the kapos; whole different thing. That extra level of comfort (and the survival rate that goes with it) was precisely why becoming a kapo was a desirable thing.

As for everything happening too quickly: You did get that the movie took place over the course of at least 3 full years (more likely over 4), right? Nicole was spending her third Christmas in the camps before she became a kapo. The fall of Paris and surrender of France was June, 1940; the rounding up of Edith's family figures to have been not too terribly long afterward, probably that fall given the coats they're wearing (spring 1941 at the latest). The end of the movie, with the German's abandoning the camps as they retreated back into Germany, would have been in the spring of 1945.