Bruxelles-transit

Transit and Transition Samy Szlingerbaum's "Bruxelles-transit" (1980) must catch our attention not only because this is really a truly unique and outstanding masterpiece, but first because of its title. By definition, people who are in transit are not allowed to leave a certain secure area during their trip. Transits are characterized by corridors: In airports, nobody can make any mistakes. The ways through these transit corridors are well defined. There are guardians standing at each corner, the doors for possible mistaken paths are closed. Also if you are traveling by train – another example for a corridor -, you cannot leave the train between the point of your departure and the point of your arrival. Transits are thus circles, in the sense of closed lines, although their actual shape may not be round. In three dimensions, a transit can be seen as a torus, which is the topological model for a corridor. So, transits are both: security area and prison. Nobody can escape from a torus.

When you go on a trip, you do not only depart at a certain time and arrive at a certain later time, but it is only in departing that you get a chance to arrive and only in arriving that you got a chance to have departed. Thus, on trips, the time-arrow is not only directed toward the future, but also toward the past – at the same time. Therefore, in transits, there are two anti-parallel or anti-dromic time-lines. Such a conception of time cannot be described by classical science, which has of course severe consequences for the metaphysical background of transits: For each decision there is a rejection. And if you make a mistake in your choices at any point of the transit, then this trip mostly turns out into a Trip into the Light – as shown by R.W. Fassbinder in his movie "Despair" (1978) or recently in the German movie by Maren Ade "Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen" ("The Forest for the Trees") (2003).

"Bruxelles-transit" describes the flight of a Jewish family from Poland to Belgium. The title "transit" points towards the fact that this trip does never end. The family stays in transit. As it is shown in the movie, they can never integrate in their new "homeland". They remain strangers amongst strangers. The Yiddish language is also a transit corridor, a mental space of no escape. Watch the scene where the young woman (Hélène Lapiower) goes to the bakery and asks the sales woman to bake their Rugelach. First, she is not understood, then, after she is helped by a French native speaker, her wish is refused. She leaves the store and throws her pastry into a river – another transit corridor. It is this feeling of being a displaced person that is the focus of this movie. The Szlingerbaum family's story serves as paradigm. People who are in transit live in a never land between the borders. Therefore, transit always implies transition, and not only the transition of borders between Eastern and Western Europe like shown in the movie, but also transition between life and death. Director Szlingerbaum himself could not stand his being in this never land of transit very long, he passed away in the age of 36.

Bruxelles-transit (1980), shown in the U.S. as Brussels Transit, is a semi-documentary written and directed by Samy Szlingerbaum.

We tried to compare the movie to other films we've seen. Nothing came to mind. In our experience, this film is truly unique.

The director's parents and sibling came to Brussels as refugees from Poland after WW II. The story of their experiences after leaving Poland is narrated--in Yiddish--by Szlingerbaum's mother in voice-over. In the first part of the film, the mother relates her experiences traveling by train from Lodz, Poland to Paris and finally to Brussels. On the screen, we see film clips of trains and train stations in modern-day Brussels.

In the second part of the film, Szlingerbaum's mother relates her experiences as a young wife and mother in an alien city. No one we see is actively cruel to her, but there's a tremendous sense of loneliness and alienation in her narrative. During the narration, actors portray the action as told to us by Szlingerbaum's mother. The scenes unfold in a static, almost dreamlike fashion. The photography is in black and white, and the actors are always seen in middle distance.

Someone complained that the French film Look at Me was too slow. Look at Me is an action-packed thriller compared to Brussels Transit. You have to approach this film expecting long periods in which virtually nothing happens, interspersed with shorter periods in which two or three characters interact in a muted fashion. If that's not your kind of film, stay away.

Reviewer's note: The Szlingerbaum family almost certainly traveled from some other country--probably Russia--before starting their journey from Lodz. The Lodz ghetto housed 250,000 Jews at one point; less than one thousand of these survived the Nazi Holocaust. If the Szlingerbaums had been in the Lodz ghetto, it would have been virtually impossible for any of them to survive, let alone their entire nuclear family.

My assumption is that the family managed to leave Poland before the Nazis arrived, and then were repatriated after the war. My guess is that Polish Jews were brought to Lodz, and then had to shift for themselves. The Szlingerbaums were fortunate to have relatives in Paris and Brussels, and that allowed them to travel to Belgium to eke out an existence in an environment that was far from ideal, but presumably was better than post-war Poland.

Mrs. Szlingerbaum does not strike one as an upbeat person. In one sense you could say that she should be happy that she survived the Holocaust. On the other hand, life was not easy for her in Belgium, and she probably contrasted the life she was living with the life she might have lived had the Germans not invaded Poland. Most of us have never lived through anything remotely like what this woman presumably experienced, so we're not in a position to pass judgment on her attitude.