La passagère

What the hell is this? I can appreciate a good avant-garde film but this just takes the mickey. Firstly its only half a film because unfortunately the director died before it was complete, there's hardly any dialogue and it kinda just jumps all over the place. Cinematicly its brilliant but the content isn't so good. I would direct people to 'Fateless' which is a much better independent Hungarian film. Yes I appreciate it was made in the 1960s at a time where there wasn't hardly any films on the subject of the holocaust and in that context then I would say its pretty ground breaking, however, i think audiences are harder to please these days and so you might end up just a little confused wondering why you spent the last hour on this film.

Don't bother watching this unless you have no other options. I can't believe i wasted £10 on this.

This is an incomplete deeply moving masterpiece. The scenes of Auschwitz are disturbing, of course, but more so set against a genuine human drama involving two women on opposite sides of this evil situation. We see how the best of human sensibility can be drawn out in the worst evil places. We witness mixed motives on the part of our overseer of prisoners. Why is she protective of this one concentration camp victim? We see her drawn to the beauty and the power of this simple woman victimized by this idiotic Nazi policy of confinement. She is also conflicted regarding this simple woman's love for her fiancee, a fellow prisoner.

This is a situation where you can genuinely regret the cruel fate that would deny us this completed film which is so powerful even in the truncated form completed by his colleagues after Munk's death. See this film if you can get a chance.

It's difficult to make an accurate assessment of this film because it's incomplete. In fact, it's far from complete. Still, from the pieces of what is left we can see that "Passenger" may well have turned out to be a masterpiece. Like Jean Vigo, Andrzej Munk was considered a cinematic genius who died too soon (in a car crash in 1960). Munk is less well known than Vigo but he is still important, especially in the development of Polish film. "Passenger" is the story of a German woman on a cruise-liner who catches a glimpse of who she believes to be a Jewish girl she was in charge of at a concentration camp during the war. She recounts to her husband in flashback the story of how she tried to protect the girl from her vicious captors. Later on though, in another flashback, we see what really happened: the woman was not the girl's protector, but a sadist who relished her position of authority and her control over the lives of the prisoners she guarded. The cruise-liner scenes are all done using still shots with a narrator (or, the "restorer" of the film) trying to decipher how exactly Munk intended to piece the film together, while the flashback scenes are actual moving images, shot in fine black and white widescreen compositions. As the "narrator" tries to understand the film, what it would have become, so do we as viewers. In this way the film itself becomes perhaps even more labyrinthine than it would have been had Munk completed it, and we have an added level of mystery that is as frustrating as it is exciting. The incomplete film entices us to guess how it would have turned out, and while its certainly not a substitute for the completed film, this fragmented "Passenger" is brilliant and tantalizing nonetheless.

In what was to be his final, incomplete film, Andrzej Munk gives an insight into an "island in time", as the narrator calls it. A woman on an ocean cruiser meets what seems to be a person from her own past - a past where she was overseer in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the other a prisoner. They were bond together by a strange link, which in the view of guard (Liza) was generally build up by some sort of respect and protection, whereas the actual events that follow Liza reminiscences leave no doubt about her participation in the inhumanity and her guild. From the point of view of Marta, the surviver (or is it someone else?), the "relationship" was different. Munks pictures show us two sides of the story in a dream-like atmosphere: Black and white, eerie music, haunting pictures. Though a totally different content, the aesthetic atmosphere recalls 'La Jetee' by Chris Marker, filmed around the same time. In all, a short but intense viewing experience that achieves great emotional impact. Way ahead of it's time.

We can't judge this film because it was unfinished and it may well have been a good career move for Munk to die before he finished it. What we have and what we imagine of the rest is a little masterpiece, but I can't help wondering whether it could have been tied together and made into a unified whole. It's got Munk's wonderful camera movements and his chracteristic concentration on faces, but I wonder what he would have done with the rest of the film.

It's worth remembering that Lisa's self-accusing account of her behaviour is every bit as subjective as her self-excusing one. In fact, it could be that there was no Marta or that Lisa never was a concentration camp guard and is imagining everything in the film.