Lost and found: Wanda Jakubowska's 'The Last Stop.' (Polish film director)
Cineaste › Vol. 22 Nbr. 4, September 1996
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Summary
Polish film director Wanda Jakubowska's film 'The Last Stop' in 1948 is considered a successful depiction of the Holocaust and concentration camp life for people who could not imagine its horrors as they had never been subjected to it. Jakubowska conveyed many facets of concentration camp living as a collective rather than an individual experience, and does so in a restrained, factual and authentic manner, so much so that many succeeding directors integrated some of the footage as actual documents of the camps into their own films.
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Lost and found: Wanda Jakubowska's 'The Last Stop.' (Polish film director)
Fictional films about the Holocaust bear historical, moral, and esthetic burdens associated with few other subjects. How, for example, can filmmakers, without being sensational and exploitative, evoke the sheer enormity of the Holocaust's horror? What sort of fictional characters can stand for the millions of victims - Gypsies, gays, Poles, Russians, and Jews, men, women, and children from every country in Europe and every walk of life? What type of narratives can replace classical film plots whose neat contrivances would seriously distort the astonishing primal and unpredictable truths of ghetto or camp existence? Indeed, is there a dramatic structure that can be conceived for a situation whose victims had so little chance to resist, and, as a consequence, are difficult to portray as conventional cinematic heroes or heroines?
Such questions loomed particularly l...See the full content of this document
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