 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
The Last Stage - Ostatni Etap DVD
[dv450] |
|
|
|
|
This product was added to our catalog on .
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Item Description |
A Jewish family from Poland, the Weisses, is sent to Auschwitz where the daughter, Martha, is selected to be an interpreter. The rest of her family are cruelly killed, and Martha and the other Poles must struggle under the tyranny of camp guards and capos. THE LAST STAGE is a powerful drama of the strength and endurance of ordinary women written by Gerda Schneider and directed by Poland s first female filmmaker, Wanda Jakubowska, who based the story on their own experiences at the notorious concentration camp.
Shot in a documentary-like style on location in Auschwitz just three years after the war ended, this recently rediscovered film is one of the earliest cinematic depictions of the Holocaust. It rings with truth and stings with authenticity. In Polish with English Subtitles Starring:Edward Dziewonski, Tatjana Grojecka, Antonina Gordon Gorecka, Barbara Drapinska, Aleksandra Slaska Directed by: Wanda Jakubowska Running time: 105 minutes Review One of the best of all Holocaust films . . . . --Sunday Age 
|
|
|
|
|
|
Michael Barrett - 03/03/2010 
A movie I found out of the blue this week is SALTO, a 1965 film by Tadeusz Konwicki. It's being released on DVD by Facets Video. Konwicki is known as one of Poland's most important postwar novelists, but it turns out he directed six features and one episode of an anthology, and now I'd like to see all of them.
This film stars Zbigniew Cybulski ("the Polish James Dean") as a crazy guy who drops into a kind of ghost town and tells various cockamamie stories, and the citizens aren't sure if they remember him or not. It's mostly a lot of curious confrontations, both intellectual and earthy, conveyed in a fluid camera style with disorienting transitions.
Wojciech Kilar is the composer, and his music is just beautiful. Over the opening credits is a stately, delicate piano piece. There's no background music during the film, but the climax is a lengthy tour de force inside a local hall where the population has gathered to celebrate an annual festival, and there's a small band of piano, drums, double-bass, guitar, clarinet and trumpet. At one point they play a beautiful waltz as the camera turns around from the center of the dancers. It has some similarity, inevitably, to Shostakovich's Jazz Waltz #2 but it's hardly the same.
The real setpiece, however, is the strange title dance, the salto. It's a driving rhythm that begins on the double-bass. Then the other instruments join in as Cybulski leads the town in the dance. This scene is very Polish, having precedents as far back as Wyspianski's classic play "The Wedding," which also ends with the whole town participating in a strange dance. The great pre-war avant-gardist Witkiewicz also employed similar dance devices in his groundbreaking plays, and although ignored in his lifetime, his work enjoyed a spectacular renaissance in 1950s Poland and influenced everybody, including Polanski. |
|
| Click to view All Reviews |
|
|
|
|
 |
| Current Reviews: 1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Currently viewing:
MGE Inc.
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
