Le cas Kapo

Abstract

The Kapo scenarioIn June of 1961, Jacques Rivette, in the Notebooks of cinema, violently denounces Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, Kapo. This is the first Western film that, through fiction, recreates the experience of a Nazi concentration camp. Jacques Rivette writes, “the abjection” is striking in its polemical tone and imposes a critical judgment on the moral of the stage. The criticism that Rivette gives towards the young leftist Italian director is less of his subject matter, a “realistic” painting of a death camp from the inside point of view, than its form : wanting, in some scenes, to “reconstitute” the horror of the extermination camp, and especially to have done it with an aesthetic concern, the death of a deportee to becoming a “beautifully filmed” piece. This study places Rivette’s text, and more generally Kapo’s vision, in its historical and cinematic context, those of the Eichmann trial and the outcome of the “author’s politics” practiced in the Cinema Notebooks since the mid-1950s. A turning point appears “from the abjection” in the perspective on the representation of the extermination, the complex relationship among fiction, art and the Holocaust.