CONCENTRATION CAMP
(Mosfilm)
N this film, considerations of whether spiritual defiance is more potent than physical opposition don’t seem to have bothered the director. He takes
a much more simple and direct approach and is all for a mass strike of the workers as a weapon against Hitlerism, working up to a grand climax in a German munition factory when the employees down tools and in serried ranks raise their left fists in the Communist salute. He. doesn’t show what happens when the. troops arrive with machineguns and you can’t help feeling that he may have been a trifle optimistic.
Nevertheless it’s a stirring finale for what is otherwise a rather dreary, slowmoving record of Nazi brutality-dreary that is, from the viewpoint of the person who goes to the movies to be entertained and not preached at or harrowed. The story follows the familiar course of the rise of Hitlerism, with a good deal of propaganda on the side to. show that it all might have been different if the Social-Democrats had not been so stupid as to disagree with the Communists and reject their leadership in a United Front against Fascism. There are, indeed, some rather longwinded and painstaking arguments on this very point; very absorbing, I have no doubt, to the Russian audiences for whom the film was specifically intended, but. even with the finest, sub-titles in English (and those in Concentration Camp and The Oppenheim Family are pretty good) it wouldn’t be exactly easy to follow a debate on Marxian dialectics. And the effect of hearing a character on the screen speaking in voluble Russian for about half a minute and then seeing it all put into one line of English translation is curious. : However, Concentration Camp has some good moments — some very grim and some very exciting. The grimmest are those in the concentration camp; and most of the exciting action occurs when several of the prisoners make a breakaway, and one of them succeeds in eluding his pursuers and, having gone underground again, organises that strike of the munition workers which I mentioned at the beginning. And here, as in The Oppenheim Family, one is constantly struck with admiration of the casting: nearly everybody in the film, even in the smallest part, is an: artist.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19420904.2.39.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 167, 4 September 1942, Page 16
Word count
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380CONCENTRATION CAMP New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 167, 4 September 1942, Page 16
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