The Passenger
Pasazerka
Andrzej Munk, Film terminé par Witold Lesiewicz après la mort d'Andrzej Munk
On the deck of a transatlantic ship, in the cold, bitter white of the North Sea, Liza, once an SS guard at Auschwitz, thinks she recognises a passenger to be one of the old prisoners, Marta, who she believed was dead. Briefly, she is revisited by images of the camp...
With : Aleksandra Slaska, Anna Ciepielewska, Marek Walczewski
Screenplay : Zoria Posmysz – Piasecka
Image : Krzysztof Winiewicz
Music : Tadeusz Baird
Screenplay : Zoria Posmysz – Piasecka
Image : Krzysztof Winiewicz
Music : Tadeusz Baird
Production : WXF (Lodz) Ensemble Kamera
Distribution: Jeck Films
Distribution: Jeck Films
Justly considered to be one of the leaders of the "Polish school", Munk (1921-1961) taught directing at the Lodz Film School and contributed to several shows for theatre and television. It was during one of these shows that Munk began filming The Passenger. In it, Munk demonstrates "a cold and calm rigour in his re-creation of the setting. No affectation, no compassion entered into his description of the camp. He painted a morally ambiguous image of what it was. This complicity between the victim and the executioner, prisoners of the same hell – some torturing, others tortured – but all swept away by the same whirlwind, had never been grasped like this in all its profound complexity" (P. Marcabru). On his way to Lodz to shoot the film's interior scenes, Andrzej Munk died in a car accident. His last work was finished by a team directed by one of his close friends, Witold Lesiewicz, and obtained the Hommage du Jury as well as the Critics Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964.