No Words
Coursing throughout The Last Stage is the fear that the world would not find out what had happened, from the prisoners desperately scanning smuggled newspapers for mention of their plight to the Grand Guignol ending and call to action.
The Last Stage
Wanda Jakubowska, 1948
Poland’s National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute, with Tor Film Production
IT REMAINS A SHOCK, soon followed by Alfréd Radok’s , both presented this past winter at the Berlin International Film Festival. Jakubowska’s landmark feature starts on a city street, where a man and a woman are talking, in the kind of throwaway moment that might run under the bustle of the opening titles. Instead, they’re rounded up with others in a Nazi raid that unfolds in the same prolonged shot, as if to underline the lurch from the safety of ordinary life to the unthinkable brutality of the Third Reich. It’s one of many felt details that testify to Jakubowska’s evident urge to preserve the precise awful sensations of fresh horrors; indeed, she had spent time in Auschwitz, and would repeatedly say that embracing the role of a witnessing filmmaker, storing up material, allowed her to endure the experience.
