Then when the internees are forced to stand in formation on the parade ground for hours on end, Koltai leaps free of Gyuri and the movie rises to another plane altogether. We're not sure why the men have been mustered, or why they're made to stand, or even how long. (A lack of information goes hand in hand with a lack of control.) As the men weaken and start to sway with exhaustion, Koltai pushes representation to the point of abstraction. He takes the camera down the lines of striped pajamas, some of which begin to undulate like waterweeds, then above and behind as the patterns of movement become more pronounced. The depersonalization becomes so extreme that it's as beautiful as it is wounding. It's the beauty in fact that makes you aware of the depersonalization because you know that what you're looking at isn't beautiful to your understanding. It's the single most daring visual passage from any movie set in a Nazi extermination camp and one that gets at the very heart of the annihilation by degrees suffered by the prisoners.
Bandi Citrom (Áron Dimény), a fellow Jew from Budapest some years older than Gyuri, does take the boy under his wing, inculcating a certain discipline to keep the conditions from wearing him down. But as Gyuri's time in the camps goes on, Koltai doesn't keep us apprised of what happens to the other characters, or even of which camp we're in, or how much time has passed. So when Bandi notices that Gyuri is limping, discovers the boy's grossly swollen knee, and takes him to what passes in the camp for an infirmary, Koltai has already prepared us to see the elements of Gyuri's story as disjunctive pieces. We never see Bandi again, or discover what happened to him (so we have no idea whether his discipline was effective). And because the healthcare system in the camp is so ambiguous, we, like Gyuri, can't be sure whether he's being loaded onto a cart to be nursed or incinerated. At one point a man throws the boy over his shoulder and we see the world from Gyuri's delirious perspective — upside down — as he passes mound after mound of living? dead? bodies. Using visual and rhythmic means, Koltai has already made conventional dramatic shaping disappear; now even the present moment is indecipherable — bare perception without the possibility of cognition, much less structure.
Koltai never struck me as a great cinematographer on István Szabó's films (Mephisto (1981), Meeting Venus (1991), Being Julia (2004)), but as a director he is a great cinematographer. (The credit goes to Gyula Pados.) And he doesn't overdo the visuals, so when the astounding sequences come they have full presence and weight. They have such sensory impact, and are conceptually so right, in fact, that it's something of a letdown when Gyuri is liberated and the more conventional narrative returns (along with the too-literary summary of his experience that Kertész has given Gyuri to speak). The traditional life "story" must return, of course, because the Nazi extermination camps were the exception to normal existence. More importantly, the depersonalization of the camps happened to individuals, albeit en masse, so it makes sense to have personality return afterwards, like blood flowing back to a numb limb. What sets Fateless apart is that the depersonalization matters to us not solely because it's happening to the character the moviemakers have invented and made us care about. At the same time, however, the movie doesn't feel remote, like an acted-out generalization about the camp experience. We're not being milked for emotion or detached from the character's suffering. No depiction of the extermination camp experience of an individual has ever been so large; it verges on the ecstatic.
Article comments
1 - Alan Dale
Temporal posted a thoughtful blog entry at Baithak about this review. I posted a response which I repeat here (with a few modifications):
Thank you for your reference to my review of Fateless. I consider "involved, wonderfully mesmerizing" high compliments.
All mass murders are to be deplored equally, of course. The Nazi genocide of the European Jews stands out, I think, b/c of a combination of a number of factors that apply only singly or in smaller combinations to some of the others you mention:
1. The European Jews were killed not b/c of anything they had done or believed (even unbelieving Jews were killed) but b/c of who they were.
2. They were killed with industrial efficiency pursuant to an official gov't policy in specially built extermination camps. (The 20 million dead Soviets you mention were military and civilian casualties of warfare and its attendant privations, in an underdeveloped economy run by a pathological butcher.)
3. The deportation and murder of the European Jews required international governmental collaboration.
4. The victims were drawn from territories ranging from the Balkans to the Baltic, from Russia and Poland to France and Italy.
5. The number of the murdered is greater, both in terms of the head count (6 million) and the percentage of the targeted population exterminated (75%).
6. The European Jews were singled out and murdered even in places such as Germany, Austria, Holland, and France after they had attained amazing degrees of professional and economic success and social integration.
7. The murder of the European Jews occurred in what had been advanced western democracies. The suffering of Kampucheans and Rwandans is no less disturbing and moving, but it is less surprising.
8. The Nazi murder of Jews was only the latest, most concentrated and coordinated effort in a long history of bloody persecution.